Taking a Holistic View of Housing Policy

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank a number of people who commented on drafts of our original article on this topic, including Douglas Massey, Paul Jargowsky, Robert G. Schwemm, Florence Wagman Roisman, Elizabeth Julian, and Todd Swanstrom. All opinions and remaining errors in the original article or this follow-up, of course, are the responsibility of the authors alone. Finally we want to thank the Ford Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation for their ongoing support of our work.

Notes

1. These data do not include Housing Choice Vouchers, unless, of course, a voucher holder is occupying an otherwise subsidized unit. However, as Schwartz notes, Housing Choice Vouchers are distributed even more segregatively than LIHTC.

2. Edwards v Hopkins Plaza Unilimited Partnership (2010).

3. For instance, this problem is frequently cited by voucher holders in surveys of housing discrimination. See, for example, Fair Housing Implementation Council (2015), p. 109.

4. See for example the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity report, Why Are the Twin Cities So Segregated? (2015).

5. The analysis included LIHTC, Section 8 projects and Housing Choice Vouchers. Only family units were included. The total number of units involved was 22,878. The MHFA data used for the analysis were unit-level data that included whether there was a child in the unit and the race of the head of household.

6. This definition excludes charter, magnet, and special purpose schools without clearly defined attendance boundaries.

7. Although these numbers are substantial, it should be noted that they represent just 7, 9, and 11% of total non-White student enrollment in the seven-county metropolitan area.

8. Race data were available for LIHTC, Section 8 vouchers and most (roughly two thirds of) Section 8 project-based units. Race distributions for Section 8 project-based units with no race data were estimated using the racial make-up of the Section 8 project-based sites closest to each unit missing data.

9. The number of children per subsidized unit was estimated using household data from the Bureau of the Census for households with income below the poverty line. The number and age distribution of children per unit were allowed to vary by race. Children in subsidized units were then assigned to the neighborhood elementary, middle, and high schools based on the estimated age distribution for all subsidized units assigned to specific school attendance boundaries.

10. These included: HUD data; MHFA data recording LIHTC awards; other MHFA records with specific project information; public data made available by city community development departments; and the archives of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Saint Paul Pioneer Press, and Finance & Commerce, a local real-estate newspaper.

11. These are Eon, Artspace, CHDC, Common Bond Communities, Project for Pride in Living, and RS Eden.