Housing Integration and Segregation

Over the last few decades housing developers have convinced the government and philanthropists to provide them with $1 billion to improve education, public health, and public safety in the Phillips neighborhood in Minneapolis. Phillips includes roughly 7,500 households, and many of its residents are impoverished and unhealthy. Its children have been performing poorly in school and dropping out, and the area has been riddled with high crime rates.

New Jersey suburbs are in the process of rapid demographic transformation. Already one of the nation’s most diverse states, the last twenty years have seen many places in New Jersey transition towards greater and greater racial diversity. These changes have important implications
for the stability and livelihood of regional municipalities and residents.

The problems accompanying neighborhood change, and particularly economic decline, are interlinked with long-standing urban issues like segregation and white flight. However, in recent years, there has been increased emphasis on anti-displacement and anti-gentrification
policies. If conducted poorly, such an approach can miss underlying issues or even make economic decline worse.

A Report to the Illinois Association of Realtors. Chicago’s suburbs are in a process of radical transformation. Across the Chicago region, the racial diversity of suburban communities continues to increase. These changes have important implications for the stability and livelihood of the suburban cities where most of the regional population lives. 

A Report to the Illinois Association of Realtors. Chicago contains both gentrification and neighborhood economic decline. Correctly understanding the relative scale of these two trends – where they’re happening, how much they’re happening, and who they’re happening to – is essential for policymakers hoping to address neighborhood change.

As a part of the New Deal in the 1930s, the Federal Housing Administration classified urban residential areas in terms of their lending risk for the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). The program itself was designed to make home ownership more accessible for first time home buyers, and facilitate the refinancing of existing home mortgages.

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.

This study examines increasing racial diversity in the suburbs of the 50 largest metropolitan areas, highlights the opportunities and challenges this trend represents, and proposes policies to promote stably integrated communities.

On June 17, 2008, Executive Director Myron Orfield used the accompanying PowerPoint in a presentation at the Soros Justice Fellowships meeting held in San Francisco.

This research traces a group of inmates back to the neighborhoods where they lived when arrested and to the schools they attended to evaluate the relationship between segregation by race and income in neighborhoods and schools and incarceration.

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 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 IRP study tracks racial change in 15 major U.S. metro areas.

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.