Shelling Redux: How Sociology Fails to Make Progress in Building and Empirically Testing Complex Causal Models Regarding Race¹

¹These comments are emerge from several decades of work with segregation, discrimination, fair housing enforcement, and racial preference data as an academic researcher and as manager of research on fair housing issues at the research office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

and Residence

Abstract

¹These comments are emerge from several decades of work with segregation, discrimination, fair housing enforcement, and racial preference data as an academic researcher and as manager of research on fair housing issues at the research office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Keywords:

• racial segregation
• housing markets
• institutional interests

Notes

¹These comments are emerge from several decades of work with segregation, discrimination, fair housing enforcement, and racial preference data as an academic researcher and as manager of research on fair housing issues at the research office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

²His definition of discrimination fails to include differential treatment of minority home seekers that appears far more frequently in national audits than exclusion, and differs importantly from redlining and steering that he mentions.

³For lower income black populations, research on housing vouchers and public housing, including the Gautreaux and MTO programs, clearly indicate that many black families when offered the opportunity will elect to move away from isolated, ghetto like conditions. Galster (1986: 133) also reminds us: “The demographic and economic characteristics of the black population itself may also be endogenous if black migration is responsive to variations in discrimination and economic inequality.”

⁴He argues that segregation has become “overdetermined”; in which segregation “may be sustained by multiple sufficient causes…”

⁵His argument is directly counter to Galster's (1991) analysis that focused on the consequences of the elimination of housing market discrimination. It shows sizeable declines in segregation.

⁶There have been three major national research projects using testing (often called “audits”) to uncover disparate treatment in housing on the basis of race or national origin. All three audits used sent pairs of identically matched housing applicants to personally measure systematic differences in treatment at the hands of rental and sales agents based on race or ethnicity. The third national housing audit, labeled “HDS 2000,” involved 4,600-paired tests in 20 metropolitan areas. Testing was completed for blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.

⁷Hispanics too have filed a number of notable claims of discrimination. In Texas, a mobile home operator pled guilty to denying Hispanics access to their homes. In another case in Illinois, the Village of Addison was found guilty of intentionally demolishing homes in a Hispanic community that were then turned over to a private developer for non-Hispanic beneficiaries. In a Delaware case a credit card company was charged with using a separate credit scoring system for credit card applicants who did not speak English and as a consequence, “Spanish language applicants were denied credit on a discriminatory basis.” Lastly in Bound Brook New Jersey, the town agreed to a consent decree in which they agreed they had used their housing code and redevelopment plan to “make housing opportunities unavailable to Hispanic residents of the borough.” There are pages more of recent cases summarized by the Justice Department that suggest a persistent if non-random set of discriminatory actions by major housing and credit market institutions as well as local jurisdictions, whose actions and often intent is to deny equal opportunity to minorities. None of this evidence suggests representative national trends except that they clearly reveal that cases have not dropped close to zero even under an administration not notable for its focus on domestic civil rights (US v. Camp Riverview, Inc; US v. Village of Addison; US v. Associate National Bank; US v. Borough of Bound Brook, NJ. (See Edsall & Edsall, 1992; Myers, 1997.)

⁸He paraphrases the Thernstrom's who “conclude that the incidence of racial exclusion grounded in violence and the threat of violence has become rare” (p. 20). I do not know what rare means, but Blacks do not need a whole lot of crosses burned to get the point that they are unwelcome.

⁹United States v. May, Department of Justice press release, March 4, 2004.

¹⁰United States v. Fuselier, April 21, 2004.

¹¹Just to ensure we do not think that racial violence only happens in housing Justice announced a guilty plea from a white supremacist in Missouri who plead guilty to attacking two African Americans in a Denny's restaurant. He and four others agreed that they had beaten, kicked and stabbed one of the black victims. Press release, April 21, 2004 re Steven Heldenbrand.

¹²Dawson (2004: 386) states, “…neighborhoods that are acceptant of minorities are generally more desirable to minority residents and less desirable to whites. This suggests that perceptions regarding discrimination and the perceived attitudes of majority residents likely play an important role in shaping residential outcomes.”

¹³MF also notes, on a related issue (p. 6) that: “Existing studies documenting the existence of discrimination.…cannot separate out the degree to which levels of observed segregation can be attributed solely to direct discrimination in the housing market.” The argumentative, italicized framing of the test as if singular forms of causality are the correct standard is misguided most especially since Galster (1986) and Galster and Keeney (1988) have tested these relationships some time ago. Sociologists or others using more current audit data have not replicated Galster's efforts.

¹⁴In his website SimSeg description, the model has 97 neighborhoods and 4,753 units.

¹⁵It has, for example, been noted for decades that measures of centralization appear analytically limited given the complex patterns of multi-centered metropolitan areas (Alihan, 1964: 166; Taeuber's 1965: 62–63).

¹⁶ Galster (1990: 395): comments: “…whites may not choose to flee in the face of prospective integration, but may ‘fight to protect their turf’ through the erection of discriminatory barriers.”

¹⁷The reader is told of ‘animation sequences’ that might in a video version be more understandable. He tells us, though, that the animations “provide an immediate, intuitive appeal…” The mental templates and value sets that are assumed which permit such intuitions to be sociological validating are not discussed. Such viewer appreciation of animations is likely built upon an unstated set of viewer's racially infused expectations and beliefs that appear unmeasured by MF.

¹⁸On MF's website (http://sociweb.tamu.edu/faculty/fossett/index.htm#) the reader is told that SimSeg is an educational rather than a research tool that enables students to “explore prevailing theories of residential segregation…”