Housing and Planning

This report summarizes policy and legal analysis related to the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity’s study of diverse suburbs, employment and jobs, and neighborhood change in the NJTPA region. It recommends that metropolitan policymakers in the NJTPA region – including state, regional and local leaders – adopt a core set of policy priorities that reflect the primary challenges that the region faces.

Comments submitted by IMO on the Draft Minneapolis 2040 Plan, as part of the city's comprehensive planning process. The comments highlight the city's legal obligations under fair housing law, discuss the proposal to allow for a larger number of dwelling units on residential lots, and criticize the city's failure to directly address the problems facing segregated and high-poverty neighborhoods.

Analysis of twelve key economic and demographic indicators shows little or no evidence of gentrification in any Minneapolis or St. Paul neighborhood. This work examines a range of characteristics associated with gentrification for the period from 2000 to 2013, including income, poverty, racial transition, displacement, home ownership, house values, rents, vacancies and affordability of the housing stock.

Minneapolis and Saint Paul are currently operating what is, in effect, a dual subsidized housing system. In this system, the majority of units are available in lower-cost, utilitarian developments located in racially segregated or diverse neighborhoods. These units are mostly occupied by families of color. But an important subset of units are located in predominately 1 white neighborhoods, in attractive, expensive buildings.

The draft Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice completed by the Fair Housing Implementation Council is entirely inadequate. Among its most notable omissions are its failure to discuss segregation in a substantive fashion, and its refusal to analyze the role of public sector in creating impediments to fair housing.

The following report explains the paradox between the Twin Cities’ progressive politics and regional planning, and its relatively high levels of racial segregation.  In doing so, it shows how powerful special interests have worked with local, regional, and state government to preserve the segregated status quo, and in the process have undermined school integration and sabotaged the nation’s most effective regional housing integration program.

A lack of cooperation and planning has led to very serious problems in the region, many of which are caused by the Metropolitan Council’s unwillingness to use its authority as intended by the legislature.

Professor Goetz’s comments reflect an obvious misunderstanding of our report and of the issues of urban racial segregation and fair housing. Yet we understand why he is upset––organizations and individuals, including Professor Goetz, have invested their time and energy toward the activities our report challenges.

This article examines the public policies determining the distribution of subsidized housing in the Twin Cities metropolitan area of Minnesota, the resulting distribution of subsidized housing, and the comparative costs associated with building in the region’s central cities or in suburbs.  

Before the housing crisis, toxic subprime loans were deeply embedded in the mortgage market in the Twin Cities and were highly targeted towards communities of color. These loans contributed eventually to the foreclosure crisis and the staggering drops in housing values that disproportionately affected people of color, stripping many moderate- and low-income communities of enormous amounts of housing wealth.

This Powerpoint presentation shows socio-economic characteristics of the University Avenue light-rail corridor in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity Director and Law School Professor Myron Orfield and Humphrey School of Public Affairs Professor Ed Goetz present "Use of Public Funds to Subsidize Housing in Inner City Neighborhoods" in a University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs housing forum.

This report documents strong racial disparities in mortgage lending in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. The Twin Cities has some of the greatest racial lending disparities in the nation, and communities of color have borne the brunt of both the subprime lending and foreclosure crisis. The report shows how much race and segregation influence mortgage lending patters in the Twin Cities.

by Myron Orfield and Thomas Luce, in Megaregions: Dissolving Spatial Boundaries (Catherine L. Ross, ed., Island Press, 2009)

This policy brief recommends significant reform of Metropolitan Planning Organizations to promote fair and sustainable metropolitan growth nationally.

This combination policy brief and research paper shows a close relationship between segregation in schools and neighborhoods and argues that policy reform for schools and housing must be closely related and regionally coordinated.

This research paper details the prevalence of segregation in many Twin Cities schools.

This article, published in the Fordham Urban Law Journal, recommends that land use and housing policies be marshaled to reduce residential racial segregation and concentrated poverty. Such policies should be statewide, or at least regional, in scope. Isolated policies encourage leap-frog development that in turn promotes both sprawl and racial segregation.

This article, published in the Vanderbilt Law Review, uses a New Jersey court case?In re Adoption of the 2003 Low Income Housing Tax Credit Qualified Allocation?to illustrate the tension between the FHA and the siting preferences in the LIHTC statute. It highlights a deep legal and philosophical contradiction in the United States between civil rights guarantees?particularly the duty to affirmatively further fair housing?and state and federal low-income housing policy.