Poverty-Pimping CDCs: The Search for Dispersal's Next Bogeyman

Abstract

There are three points made by Orfield et al. that I will address in my comments. The first is the authors' contention that housing policy should be driven by the obligation to integrate. Second, the authors suggest that higher costs of building affordable housing in Minneapolis and Saint Paul is due to the particular characteristics of the ”poverty housing” industry in the two cities. Finally, the authors conduct an analysis of a specific affordable housing development in Minneapolis and purport to show that the project has produced no community level benefits.

Notes

^1. On the other hand, one could also note that housing policy has been enlisted in service of any number of additional policy objectives, from macroeconomic recovery to the maintenance of racial or class segregation, privatization, the expansion of the “ownership society,” the facilitation of gentrification, etc. That is, housing policy has sometimes been used, cynically or not, to produce outcomes that have little or nothing to do with the welfare of low-income people or the healthy functioning of their communities.

^2. Taken from Family Housing Fund (2014) “Working doesn't always pay for a home.” http://www.fhfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Working_Doesnt_Pay_for_Home_H-T_May-2014.pdf.

^3. Metropolitan Council, (2014). Housing Policy Plan, St. Paul, MN. http://www.metrocouncil.org/METC/files/54/54ec40bb-d6ce-45bb-a571-ee00326ccd20.pdf.

^4. See, e.g., Shannon v. HUD 436, F.2d. 809 (1970), Trafficante v. Metropolitan Life Insurance, Co., 409 U.S. (1972), Otero v. New York City Housing Authority, 484 F.2d, 1122 (1973), NAACP Boston Chapter v. Secretary of HUD, 817 F.2d 149 (1987), Thompson V. HUD, 220 F. 3d 241 (2000), Inclusive Communities Project v. Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, 860 F. Supp. 2d 312 (N.D. Tex. 2012).

^5. To add to the confusion of this part of the article, the authors turn their attention, at least initially, away from the cost differential to how the characteristics of the “Twin Cities Development Community” contribute to the more general “unresponsiveness to cost” of affordable housing in the region. Unfortunately, Orfield et al. have not demonstrated that affordable housing in the region is “unresponsive to cost.” What they demonstrated in their original model is that there is a cost differential between the cities and the suburbs. The assertion that there is a generalized unresponsiveness to cost is supported by neither data nor any analysis.

^6. An alternative interpretation of the choice of income, poverty, and labor force participation as measures of success is that Orfield et al. may have anticipated that the project would have put into motion economic transformations that would have improved labor force participation among residents, increased their incomes, and reduced poverty. If this is the case, the deficiencies of their study related to time frame and scale of analysis are relevant.