Yesterday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) approved a new fair housing rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. This follows the Supreme Court’s recent ruling allowing HUD to use disparate impact as a criterion for determining whether a community is guilty of unfair housing practices.
Racists. Wikimedia photo by Bernard Gagnon.
In one form of disparate impact analyses, HUD compares the racial makeup of a city or suburb with the makeup of the urban area as a whole. If the city doesn’t have enough minorities, it is presumed guilty and must take steps to attract more. Under the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, that could mean subsidizing low-income housing or rezoning land for high-density housing.
While the Antiplanner has no doubts that prejudice is still a factor in housing in America, there are many other factors that influence the distribution of people across an urban area. These include religion, education, and personal tastes in food, recreation, and other activities. For example, low-income families with children will be more likely to live near a Walmart Supercenter while high-income families with no children will be more likely to live near a Whole Foods. To expect every suburb, most of whose borders are based on little more than historical accidents, to have a perfect mix of races is absurd.
For this and other reasons, looking at individual cities and suburbs is the wrong level of analysis. What’s more, HUD’s high-density housing remedy is completely wrong.
This remedy is based on two fallacies. First, it assumes that high-density housing is more affordable than single-family housing, when in fact it costs more per square foot and only saves money if people are willing to sacrifice space and privacy. Second, the rule assumes that it is somehow “fair” to pack low-income minorities in apartments while higher-income whites get to live in single-family homes so long as the apartments and single-family homes are in the same municipalities. This is far more racist than the current situation.
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The real problem with housing affordability is not at the community level but at the regional level. In a region that has few land-use restrictions, a community that has attracted wealthy people is not going to have much of an effect on the affordability of the region as a whole because builders can always construct more affordable housing elsewhere. The problem is in regions with urban-growth boundaries and other restrictions that limit the construction of affordable housing over the entire region.
If HUD were to apply disparate-impact criteria to regions, it might look at the change in African-American populations between 2000 and 2010. Nationwide, the black population grew by 11 percent in that time period, which was about 1.3 percent faster than the population as a whole. Regions whose black populations grew less than 1.3 percent faster than their whole populations could be considered guilty of housing discrimination.
Based on this, the most racist major (more than a million people) urban area in America is San Francisco-Oakland. Though that region’s population grew by 285,000 people between 2000 and 2010, or 9.5 percent, the region’s black population actually shrank by nearly 49,000, or 14.2 percent, for a difference in growth rates of minus 23.7 percent.
That decline was due to strict land-use policies that prevent development outside of the 17 percent of the region that has already been urbanized, making the Bay Area one of the least affordable housing markets in the nation. Moreover, a recent plan to improve affordability by following HUD’s prescription of building more high-density housing was found to actually reduce affordability.
Other racist urban areas would include Austin (-21.5% difference between black and overall population growth), Riverside-San Bernardino (-17.5%), Honolulu (-15.4%), San Diego (-14.6%), Los Angeles (-14.5%), Bakersfield (-13.6%), and San Jose (-11.1%). All of these regions except Austin have some form of growth-management policy, while Austin has become the least affordable housing market in Texas due to local housing policies. Note: Unlike the other urban areas listed here, Austin and Riverside-San Bernardino did not experience declines in black residents, but the growth of their black populations was much slower than their overall growth.
By comparison, the least racist major urban area is Salt Lake City, whose black population grew 57 percent faster than its total population. Other non-racist areas include Minneapolis-St. Paul (42%), Phoenix (34%), Providence (25%), Boston (19%), Las Vegas (17%), Columbus (14%), Orlando (14%), Atlanta (13%), Tampa (13%), and Miami (10%). Of these, only Providence and Boston are surprises since both have serious housing affordability problems.
If HUD is serious about fair housing, and not just jumping on the density bandwagon to please special interest groups, it should consider ordering urban areas in California, Hawai’i, and other states to relax their land-use laws and allow more home construction on the urban fringe. This will have the effect of restoring property rights to landowners whose uses have been restricted by land-use regulations. Otherwise, the Supreme Court’s ruling will only result in making housing even more unfair than it was before.
Of course, the rich white liberals who decry the rest of us as racist are the most racist of all, if you use the argument that segregated neighborhoods are somehow racist, instead of the natural order of things, people trying to congregate together with others like them. However, it’s also true that these limo liberals and yuppies do NOT want the poor in their neighborhoods. They want them elsewhere, somewhere in the region so they can feel they’re “doing something”, but far away enough for comfort.
Hell, even Al Sharpton has an expensive apartment in the rich New York Upper West Side, far away from the poor people he supposedly champions.
metrosucks is spot on.
The rich white liberals in Seattle (which is overwhelmingly liberal at 80%+ and overwhelmingly rich with median house prices in some neighborhoods over a million bucks) talk so much about diversity, yet they isolate themselves in rich white enclaves of upper Queen Anne, Magnolia, Laurelhurst, etc. and likely never venture to Beacon Hill, Columbia City, or the South Sound’s diverse suburbs.
The suburban school where I taught was 70% non-white was composed of ethnic minorities who never left the slums to venture into Seattle. Some of their lofty goals included “getting a million dollars by any means necessary” (written by a student wearing a ankle monitor after robbing and vandalizing an elderly woman’s home), getting into Section 8 housing and onto food stamps after graduation, and attending school for the sole purpose of recruiting other girls into prostitution. The family brawls in the parking lot by Pacific Islanders was a particularly fascinating cultural gem, as were the drive-by shootings and frequent robberies of the local McDonald’s.
By all means, let’s wave a magic wand and move some of these diverse characters into the richest and whitest parts of Seattle. What could go wrong?
This type of urban “planning” is why I hate the planning profession. This is treating real people like they are solely numbers on a graph. They think that someone with demographics “X” in a certain zip code become someone else if the government moves them to another zip code. There is just so much blatant racism and discrimination in the housing programs, though they think it is “good discrimination” and “good racism”.
Hear, hear Sandy.
No taxpayer-supported unit should be allowed to use a racist system to remedy racism. None.
Is this a joke? If the racial makeup of an urban area as a whole is affected by “other factors” besides prejudice then how is the derivative of that makeup supposed to be any better?
Oh right, I get it. Of course the Antiplanner wasn’t really serious, he was just grasping for a number to smear one of the most diverse urban areas in the US. You know, because planning.
Some context for the HUD plan is important, though. First, it’s primarily meant to prevent the sort of misuse of Community Block Grants that occurred in Westchester County, a place that was happy to accept gobs of federal money to create affordable housing but failed to actually, you know, create any affordable housing. If Westchester wants to stay a gated community of estates and mansions and keep the undesirable apartment-dwellers out forever, fine, but then they shouldn’t have accepted all the HUD money in the first place.
Say the zoning says the minimum lot size is 5000 square feet with a maximum FAR of 0.5 and only one unit permitted. In a desirable area the land alone can easily be a few hundred grand. That prices a lot of people out right away. Increase the FAR, allow more units, or allow smaller lots if you’re fixated on detached structures. Yea, that means the people living there have less space than the richer people in the large houses. So don’t force anyone to live there, just make it an option, which it isn’t today. You already, right now, have cheap new build houses on the fringe for those that want them (and can afford them), yes even on the fringe of SF or Portland metros. But right now a lot of desirable inner neighborhoods don’t have an option for those who aren’t very well off to live there. Solely because of government regulations that make smaller and more affordable homes in multi unit structures illegal. Why is that defensible?
“But right now a lot of desirable inner neighborhoods don’t have an option for those who aren’t very well off to live there. Solely because of government regulations that make smaller and more affordable homes in multi unit structures illegal. Why is that defensible?”
Do you really want to those $1 happy hour PBR drinkers living in your backyard? Playing cornhole? Blasting Sublime? Do you? DO YOU?!
Frank, to a point I prefer economically diverse neighborhoods. I find the people that live in them less repulsed by people not like themselves. I have a high paying job and no criminal record, I don’t make much noise, take up lots of parking spots, do drugs, attract the police, or leave shit around, but I’m an often unwelcome outsider everywhere I go. I feel much more welcome in less homogenous neighborhoods.
Some well known rich liberal neighborhoods wouldn’t want me, despite what I can afford. In an area where the concentration of poverty gets past a certain point it’s a mess to live there, but a handful of the unemployable, say in some kind of halfway house down the block, isn’t something I find objectionable.
What’s cornhole and sublime?
Special interest group, singular, and that would be the Democratic Party. HUD’s rules are just a way to get around the federalist constraints placed on the national government in the Constitution. If the Dem’s can get around those pesky states and instead derive their power from artificially racially diverse “regions”, well, then they’re set. No need to have elections at all.
Say the zoning says the minimum lot size is 5000 square feet with a maximum FAR of 0.5 and only one unit permitted.
That is an absurd assumption, especially in reference to central cities.
First, it’s primarily meant to prevent the sort of misuse of Community Block Grants that occurred in Westchester County, a place that was happy to accept gobs of federal money to create affordable housing but failed to actually, you know, create any affordable housing.
They got the money, therefore they were successful.
You want them to “create” affordable housing with other people’s money? Central planning is hard work.
To create “equality”, central government planning inevitably will go toward tearing down the “better” to get it to the “average” rather than build up the “lesser” to get it to the “average”. Building up the “lesser” is hard because you have to figure out what is the REAL cause and cure REAL problems. It is just much easier to tear down the “better” because it doesn’t take much to know how to destroy things.
To create “equality” schools throw lots of money at the delinquents and poor performers and get little results. But if you simply teach to the lowest expectations, then the smarter students are pulled down to the average and you end up with more equality in the outcome. To create “equality” in income, it would be hard work to create a booming economy to lift the poor. Much easier to raise taxes on the rich and they will move or hide their “income” into other categories and soon enough you will have more “equality” in income.
In housing, it is difficult to destroy the very rich neighborhoods because they have too much money and power, but you can make sure the upper middle class neighborhoods never develop their full potential by requiring they must have neighbors who don’t fit into the upper middle class lifestyle. Much easier to do that than to fix the problems of the poor neighborhoods.
The Antiplanner wrote:
In one form of disparate impact analyses, HUD compares the racial makeup of a city or suburb with the makeup of the urban area as a whole. If the city doesn’t have enough minorities, it is presumed guilty and must take steps to attract more. Under the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, that could mean subsidizing low-income housing or rezoning land for high-density housing.
What happens when the a central core jurisdiction is losing at least one group of minority population, and is gaining a majority population?
That is what appears to be happening in the District of Columbia, according to this 2013 article from the Washington Business Journal.
The former D.C. “Mayor-for-Life,” Marion Shepilov Barry, Jr., died in 2014, promoting The New Republic to comment:
Yet whether Barry hastened or delayed the gentrification that has transformed the city for the better after he left office in 1999 is hard to say. It was probably both. While Barry cultivated the image of a black militant, he had long since made his peace with the city’s entrenched financial interests, especially its developers. While squandering the city’s money, he spread it around with results that are now visible everywhere.
And then this (emphasis added):
Now Barry is gone but his people remain, a dispossessed pocket in a multihued metropolis where ambitious millennials, tasteful restaurants, gleaming condos, and disturbing inequality are all flourishing. With the departure of its favorite son, what remains of the Chocolate City has lost its voice.