Housing Integration and Segregation

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.