Fair Housing Policy and the Abandonment of Public Housing Desegregation

Abstract

In this article I examine the failure of fair housing policy to desegregate public housing in the USA. The article reviews major federal actions toward public housing segregation, as well as broader public housing segregation patterns and trends in the USA. It then draws on a variety of archival sources to present an in-depth case study of public housing segregation and desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky. Unlike previous studies of the subject, this article provides a detailed investigation of the relationship between local public housing tenancy policies and changes in racial occupancy across Louisville's housing projects spanning the last 50 years. The article argues for the importance of research on local-scale policy implementation for our understanding of fair housing policy, and it draws from its investigation of Louisville some conclusions about the inability of fair housing policy in the USA to realize its stated objectives.

Keywords::

• Public housing
• fair housing
• racial segregation
• desegregation
• discrimination
• housing policy

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant Program [grant number H-21387SG].

Notes

¹ The number of comments received for proposed rules are available at http://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D = HUD-2011-0138-0001 and http://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D = HUD-2013-0066-0001.

² In his study of public housing in Boston, Vale (2000) does examine changing patterns of racial occupancy, but perhaps because of the large number of housing projects in Boston he does not investigate specific interconnections between occupancy policies and patterns at each project in the city. Furthermore, the incrementally more proactive nature of Louisville's desegregation policies affords a more detailed analysis of such interconnections than is presented by Vale.

³ According to HUD, Westchester County has failed to carry out the terms of a 2009 consent decree obligating the county to affirmatively further fair housing by assessing impediments to fair housing and addressing exclusionary zoning laws. The rift has made national headlines in part due to HUD's unusually aggressive push to enforce fair housing regulations in this case, after decades of relative inaction (Anti-Discrimination Center, 2014; Hannah-Jones, 2012a, 2012b). The Dallas case involves allegations that the city has steered new affordable housing development away from downtown and higher-income neighborhoods, and toward lower-income neighborhoods (Hannah-Jones, 2013; Schutze, 2013).

⁴ Among the racially mixed projects identified by Coulibaly et al. (1998) were a small number built under the PWA between 1934 and 1937. However, the extent of racial integration in these projects (as well as those built thereafter under the United States Housing Authority) should not be overstated. Some contained only a handful of whites or blacks (10 black-occupied units out of 650 in a Cleveland project, for example), while others were subdivided into black and white sections, as was the case at Laurel Homes in Cincinnati (Casey-Leininger, 2008).

⁵ The “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” rule proposed by HUD in 2013 has finally, after 45 years, defined the phrase as “taking proactive steps beyond simply combating discrimination to foster more inclusive communities and access to community assets for all persons protected by the Fair Housing Act” (USDHUD 2013b). As noted above, however, what constitutes “proactive steps” is not specified in the proposed rule.

⁶ Rankings from 1993 are more representative of historical PHA sizes, as reductions in public housing inventories since then vary considerably from city to city. The Louisville Metro Housing Authority, as it is now called, currently has the 23rd largest number of public housing units in the USA.

⁷ Iroquois Homes has since been demolished, and today public housing in Louisville is as segregated as ever (LMHA, 2013). Its two remaining traditional housing projects, Beecher Terrace and Parkway Place, are 97.0 per cent and 95.8 per cent African American, respectively. Tenants of public housing within in the city's two HOPE VI sites are also overwhelmingly African American, making up 98.9 per cent of Park DuValle (formerly Cotter and Lang Homes) and 97.1 per cent of Liberty Green (formerly Clarksdale Homes).

⁸ These figures are calculated from decennial census data and the occupancy data sources cited in Figure 2.

⁹ Federal court rulings themselves were of course the outcomes of litigation originating at the local scale.

¹⁰ Aside from legal scholarship (see, for example, Relman et al.2010; Seng & Caruso, 2010), the urban studies literature is largely silent about this time period, which suggests an avenue for further research that expands beyond the former's narrow focus on case law to encompass evolving policies and segregation patterns at the local scale.