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Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing

Are There Reasons for Skepticism?

HOWARD HUSOCK

It is not difficult to understand the motivations of the federal Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Rule. Notwithstanding two generations of anti-discrimination “fair housing” policy enforcement, the minority poor in the United States continue to be disproportionately concentrated, residentially, in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This circumstance, in turn, can influence adult access to employment and, perhaps more significantly, limit access of disadvantaged children to the higher-performing schools found in more affluent communities.¹ The AFFH Rule itself emphasizes the latter point, stating as a normative goal that “no child’s ZIP code should determine her opportunity to achieve.” What distinguishes the AFFH Rule from historic fair housing strategies or anti-discrimination efforts is its obligatory nature for communities that accept Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funding. As HUD puts it, “The final rule helps to facilitate communities relying on local knowledge and local decision-making to determine best strategies for meeting their fair housing obligations at the local level—including making place-based investments to revitalize distressed areas, or expanding access to quality affordable housing throughout a community” [emphasis added].²

Using the leverage of federal funding to support the construction of affordable housing (meaning subsidized, whether directly or indirectly) in relatively high-income communities and to use such housing to deconcentrate poverty is strong medicine, to be sure. A new generation of social science research, however, suggests that such an approach holds the promise of successfully addressing social problems—including, for instance, race-linked housing patterns and minority access to good public schools—that have long seemed intractable. As HUD has stated, in reference to covered jurisdictions:

This chapter acknowledges and reviews recent research that provides support for an AFFH approach before going on to express skepticism about it. My skepticism disputes neither the findings nor (in any major way) the methodology of the relevant research. Rather, I question the practicality of bringing AFFH policy to scale, in part because of the difficulty of tailoring policy such that those most likely to benefit are those targeted by the program. I take the view that, notwithstanding its name, affirmatively furthering fair housing is less about “fair housing”—in terms of nondiscrimination, equal opportunity, and racial/ethnic integration—and more about a model to improve the life chances, and the prospect of upward mobility, for those who participate in the program; in other words, zip code should not define prospects. The arguments that follow express skepticism especially in this context. Specifically, I raise questions concerning the program’s implicit but, I argue, central assumptions: that little can be done to ameliorate conditions in disadvantaged zip codes and that “deconcentration” of their residents should be prescribed. The chapter puts such an approach in the context of past public policies that, I argue, have undermined the social and physical capital of lower-income neighborhoods, undermined minority asset building, and, in effect, resisted the idea, endorsed here, that poor neighborhoods can be good neighborhoods—conditioned, crucially, on the provision of public goods in the form of a full range of effective public services.

Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rationale and Related Evaluation Research

The research findings that have provided support for AFFH-type policy have not, to be sure, examined the effects of the AFFH Rule itself, the final version of which was promulgated by HUD only in mid-2015 and implemented only briefly before its suspension. Rather, they are based in studies of the experimental HUD program Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing (MTO), which, between 1997 and 2005, offered randomly selected households in high-poverty public housing projects the opportunity to move to low-poverty neighborhoods through the use of housing vouchers that allowed for rental of housing with private landlords, with rent capped at 30 percent of household income. Research based on evaluation of the MTO program has taken a variety of forms over the past decade, and recent positive results have emerged only over time, after a first round of studies observed only modestly positive effects, if any. Jeffrey Kling, Jeffrey Liebman, and Lawrence Katz found, for instance, in 2005, that “housing mobility by itself does not appear to be an effective anti-poverty strategy—at least over a five-year horizon. The MTO demonstration program was motivated by theories and non-experimental empirical results suggesting that there would be large economic gains from moving to lower-poverty neighborhoods.” However, they “found no consistent evidence of treatment effects on adult earnings or welfare participation. Whether economic gains begin to appear in the longer run, particularly among MTO children, remains to be seen.”⁴

Other research has found that significant housing market distortions that disadvantage those not participating in the program cannot be ruled out. A 2015 study concludes that increases in the number of voucher holders may drive up rents such that they conform to the amount the voucher covers—to the potential detriment of lower-income, nonvoucher households.⁵

Skeptical accounts have, however, given way to new research that shows more positive results. Recent work by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz has led to significant enthusiasm for an MTO-style deconcentration approach. Using a longitudinal analysis, they find that MTO offers important long-term promise. Specifically, they conclude that the children of MTO participant households earn significantly more as young adults than would otherwise have been expected. They write:

Another analysis that also draws on MTO may help explain such findings: “As households move from high-poverty to low-poverty tracts via the MTO rent subsidy, their rent falls and their child value-add rises.” Consequently, “policy-makers can significantly affect child outcomes as long as housing vouchers directly target high-value-added neighborhoods.”⁷ Even voucher holders who were not part of the MTO experiment are said to be likely to choose neighborhoods with better schools when they have children reaching school age.⁸ Morris Davis, Jesse Gregory, Daniel Hartley, and Kegon Tan go on to suggest that “large-scale adoption” of voucher-based programs could have such positive effects.⁹ The AFFH Rule would seem to be a first step in such a direction.

Methodological Reasons for Skepticism

Nonetheless, even if one accepts the findings of Chetty, Hendren, and Katz as persuasive about the potential value of poverty deconcentration on the MTO model, some skepticism is still in order. First, it is worth noting that in the MTO program, although public housing residents were randomly selected for the offer of housing vouchers that would allow them to move to higher-income neighborhoods, the moves were entirely voluntary. Thus, the assumption that these same households would not have thrived in public housing—or ultimately stayed—is open to question. In addition, on an implementation level, serious questions exist about the practicality of a scaled-up AFFH-type program. Chetty, Hendren, and Katz note that

It is hard, however, to imagine a federal program for which eligibility, for instance, would be limited to narrow population bands (typically, aid programs are based on household income) or that requires quick and ongoing adaptation to market conditions (e.g., adjusting rents such that they do not distort the nonsubsidized market).

Practical Reasons for Concern

Further, it is important to keep in mind that, notwithstanding the relatively large magnitude of federal spending on housing choice vouchers (at $19 billion annually, its appropriation exceeds that of cash public assistance, for instance), it is not an entitlement program and thus does not serve all those households that would qualify simply on the basis of income. Robert Collinson, Ingrid Ellen, and Jens Ludwig¹¹ estimate that of 19 million renters with incomes below 50 percent of area median, only 4.6 million receive any form of federal housing assistance, and 2.2 million of these receive housing vouchers. Thus, only one in four of those eligible currently receive housing assistance.¹² Expansion to serve the universe of the income-eligible could thus require nearly $100 billion annually or more.¹³ One must conclude that scaling up the program to serve the universe of low-income households, as well as to make it possible for the recipients to be dispersed to higher-income neighborhoods, is extremely unlikely. Indeed, Congress has consistently declined to support relatively small budget increases for the program, such as one proposed by the Barack Obama administration to increase the voucher budget to $21.2 billion.¹⁴

The Unwritten Rules of the Housing Market

Moreover, such extensive intervention in the lives of individual low-income households and in higher-income neighborhoods must work against powerful and perennial tides in the socioeconomic character of the housing market. First, low-income households may not prefer to move to low-poverty areas, in which they would be atypical. As Ellen observes, “Social ties also likely play a role in potentially limiting the neighborhoods considered by voucher households. If people choose to locate near family and friends, and disadvantaged individuals tend to have disadvantaged social networks located in higher-poverty neighborhoods, then this may restrict where voucher families look for housing.”¹⁵ Low-income households, in other words, may value other aspects of neighborhood life, such as proximity to religious institutions and family members, even more than school-system quality.

Further, large-scale dispersion of low-income households to higher-income neighborhoods must be considered in the context of historic residential housing patterns and choices, which are largely shaped by socioeconomic status. This informal but powerful system has long been recognized by scholars. P. H. Rees observes that “socioeconomic status is a universal sorting principal in American cities.”¹⁶ Michael White notes, further, that residence is related to a household’s sense of status: “Educational attainment and occupation are good overall indicators of a neighborhood’s status. The level of income, correlated with these two characteristics, is the most direct indicator of a household’s ability to ‘purchase’ status, or at least purchase a residence in what is regarded as a high status neighborhood.”¹⁷ Put another way, one’s residence is not just a means to purchase a package of publicly provided amenities; it is regarded as evidence of achievement and accomplishment. Indeed, community residents may well not regard the quality of life in their community as neither immutable nor inevitable nor as evidence of “privilege.”

Communities whose services are viewed by the AFFH Rule as appropriate to be shared may be viewed by residents as the result not simply of affluence but of ongoing community effort: school board oversight, parental involvement, code enforcement, policing. Communities, in the context of such local control, expect new entrants to share such values and to contribute to what may be voluntary efforts; capacity to afford to buy or rent in a community is seen as a marker of such capacity.

Although discrimination based on race and ethnicity arguably require efforts, such as the AFFH Rule, its effects can be overemphasized. As Anna Hardman and Yannis Ioannides write:

Nor is it obvious that a public interest in more racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods—what can be understood as an expanded version of fair housing, as judged by intracommunity racial and ethnic diversity—is best served by government-initiated interventions designed to achieve such an outcome. As Herbert Gans observes in his classic 1967 book about postwar American suburbanization, The Levittowners, “Experience with residential integration in many communities, including Levittown, indicates that it can be achieved without problems when the two races are similar in similar socio-economic level and in the visible cultural aspects of class.”¹⁹

Indeed, backlash toward AFFH-style interventions can transcend race, as in the case of Westchester County, New York, where an AFFH-style HUD initiative (sparked by a lawsuit) designed to encourage the construction of subsidized housing in affluent areas has stirred controversy. A self-identified African American resident of one higher-income community observed: “As an African-American who happily resides in one of the aforementioned towns targeted for this deplorable lower income housing, I am appalled at this decision to reward those individuals who . . . chose the easy way out instead of dedicating oneself to hard work. . . . My wife and I worked hard to be able to purchase a home and pay taxes in one of these towns, just like everyone else who resides in them.”²⁰ This is just one person’s comment, of course. However, I have encountered similar attitudes in conducting magazine reportage in the south suburbs of Chicago, where voucher holders were relocating to middle-class African American neighborhoods and where local political leaders expressed reluctance to accept such households.²¹

Is Relocation Necessary? The Flaws of Environmental Determinism

It is crucial, however, not to focus narrowly on the implementation flaws of the AFFH Rule in considering how housing markets can best serve those of modest means. One must consider its crucial—and, in my view, faulty—underlying assumption: that low-income neighborhoods cannot be “good neighborhoods” and that government-led intervention must seek, in effect, to rescue such households (especially because of the future prospects of their children) through relocation. Again, the AFFH Rule is less about non-discrimination and more about improving the life chances of those potentially relocated. The impracticality of such an effort at a grand scale begs the bigger question of how best to lay the groundwork for the largest numbers of lower-income households to enjoy a high quality of life and hope, plausibly, for a path of upward mobility for themselves and their children. In my view, this goal requires, as a practical matter, a commitment to providing the highest-possible-quality public goods for low-income neighborhoods—that is, the places where most poor households actually live. And it requires an appreciation of the flaws of a long history of choosing other approaches that have not turned out well.

Work such as Chetty, Hendren, and Katz’s compares the fates of members of low-income households who move to more affluent communities with those who remain “behind,” if you will, in comparison communities—such as public housing. It is important to appreciate the profound, and relevant, irony of such a comparison. For although public housing projects would become associated with crime, disorder, and long-term poverty, that was hardly the goal or the vision of their original, idealistic proponents. For its Depression-era advocates, public housing was viewed in terms not dissimilar from those of current-day advocates of the AFFH Rule: a new, safe, sanitary, bright environment in which low-income children would thrive. Privately built low-income neighborhoods were branded as slums—and were implicated in social ills. In regard to the original public housing authorizing legislation, John Bauman writes that “the Wagner-Steagall bill enunciated a national housing policy: to provide federal aid for the eradication of slums, and ‘for decent, safe and sanitary dwellings for families of low-income . . . for the reduction of unemployment and the stimulation of business activity.’”²² Nor was the improvement conceived of as merely a physical upgrade. Alexander von Hoffman describes the view that one’s surroundings can shape and improve one’s character as “environmental determinism,” a doctrine he sees as one with deep roots:

The response to this dream that failed has been to identify flaws that might be fixed, whether caused by high-rise design²⁴ or due to a presumed lack of income mixture.²⁵ Increasingly elaborate forms of financing and subsidy, such as the low-income housing tax credit and inclusionary zoning, have sought to guarantee income-group mixture, on the assumption that such an environment will somehow help uplift those of lower incomes.

The AFFH Rule falls squarely in this long Progressive—and, I would argue, naïve—tradition. Although it is framed as a housing integration strategy, it is clearly designed—first and foremost—to improve the life chances of potential participants. Racial integration is a useful rationale that allows the program to avail itself of settled case law and federal regulatory authority. But language such as that which asserts that one’s zip code should not be one’s destiny clearly has in mind the goal of improving life chances, not seeking racial integration as an end in itself.

Its underlying assumptions, however, ignore the possibility that, with the right package of public goods, low-income neighborhoods with widely dispersed ownership and modest housing types can be good neighborhoods—that is, springboards for upward mobility—as they surely have been in the past. In other words, a more fully realized community development strategy—to use HUD parlance—might be more effective and inspire less resistance. One cannot, of course, overlook the fact that municipal governments have, historically, failed to provide the sorts of public goods that make for healthy neighborhoods—and they should be pressured, not least by their own citizens, to do so. But ignored too is history that indicates that “slums” were unjustly maligned and can be seen as having offered a better chance for asset building and upward mobility than the generations of subsidized housing that have been undertaken—best symbolized by the establishment, in 1965, of HUD, a new federal agency dedicated to this purpose.

The Overlooked History of Privately Provided Affordable Housing

For what might be called a counter-history of American slums, one can look to such investigations as Slums of the Cities, issued by the federal Commissioner of Labor Statistics in 1892, and Immigrants in Cities, issued by the U.S. Immigration Commission in 1907. Notably, the 1894 report, in which canvassers assessed conditions, found that in poor neighborhoods in sixteen cities (including New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago), although individual baths and toilets were rare, “there was no greater sickness prevailing in the districts canvassed than in other parts of the cities involved, and while the most wretched conditions were found here and there, the small numbers of sick people discovered was a surprise to the canvassers.”²⁶ (Notably, a key public good, widely supplied in this era, was the public bath.²⁷) Surprising too is the finding that “the earnings of the occupants in the slum districts canvassed are quite up to the earnings of the people generally and at large.”²⁸ In other words, New York’s Tenement Museum’s latter-day characterization of tenement housing as memorializing the “urban log cabin”—that is, a starting point for gradual improvement—is not misplaced.²⁹

By the time of the 1907 Immigration Commission report, it was not clear that physical conditions in areas designated as slums were nearly as bad as the retrospective stereotype. The commission reported that 80 percent of the homes studied were kept in either good or fair condition.³⁰ To the extent that conditions were substandard, the commission pointed the finger less at private owners than at local government: “The neglected appearance of many of the streets is a result of indifference on the part of public authorities.”³¹ Nor was housing beyond the means of low-income households—a common concern today. In 1909, another federal investigation, this one by the President’s Home Commission, found that the lowest-income households surveyed in the District of Columbia paid a reasonable percentage of their incomes for housing—indeed, far less than the 30 percent that would later be considered a gold standard: “The average family, with an income of $500 or less per annum, expended about $6 per month for rent, this item constituting about 21 percent of the total family income.”³²

Significantly, low-income neighborhoods in the pre–public housing, pre-subsidy era were not, as legend would have it, dominated by a few powerful absentee landlords: “A very large proportion of families living in houses owned by some member of the family are seen to have one, two, or three tenements to a house.”³³ An analysis of the 1892 data indicates, for instance, that in Chicago, of 1,439 residential structures in the area surveyed, 397 were occupied by their owners. Just as important, however, is the fact that many of these were multifamily structures—including seventy-three two-family, sixty-eight three-family, and fifty-one four-family homes. As a result, of 3,484 renter (non-owner) households, 1,042, or 29.8 percent, lived in buildings in which resident-owners also lived.³⁴ Many tenants were also themselves resident-landlords, since boarders were common.³⁵ Moreover, it is quite possible that some resident-owners owned additional, nearby property. This was a neighborhood, one can infer, in which owners would have been immediately accountable for the upkeep of the premises and in which tenants would feel a responsibility of good behavior, less they face eviction. A social as well as an economic compact was in force. Owners held a valuable asset; tenants could see the example of owner-occupants and aspire to own a similar asset. Both economic and social capital was being accumulated in what outsiders viewed as slums. Such were the worlds that were blithely swept away by such housing reformers as Catherine Bauer, who cleared the way for public housing in which owners were replaced by a distant management and ownership was public. Worse, the failure of the reform model has led to the belief that “concentrated poverty,” by its nature, makes for an undesirable neighborhood. The AFFH Rule is inspired directly by such a view.

Dispersed ownership of modest dwellings—including minority group member ownership—continued, in fact, until, in some cases, actual clearance for public housing occurred. Consider, for instance, the St. Louis neighborhoods that were cleared to make way for the later-infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing project, itself demolished only two decades after it was built. Federal census data from 1950, five years before the construction of the Pruitt portion of the project and six years before Igoe, are revealing. An examination of St. Louis Census tract 11-A, which was 98 percent Black, reveals that 21 percent of all housing units (828 of 3,696) were the property of “nonwhite owners.”³⁶ In addition, the Census data show that, although there were just 721 single-family units, there were 828 owner-occupied units—meaning that at least 107 owners could be found in two-family through five-family buildings. Thus, as in nineteenth-century Chicago, many tenants rented from on-site owners. The numbers were not dissimilar in Census tract 21-B, which was 96 percent Black. At least 23 percent of all dwelling units had an owner present, and almost all (460 of 480 owner-occupants) were Black. The numbers for both neighborhoods are below the citywide average—34 percent owner-occupants and 41 percent of structures with an owner present—but not dramatically so. Notably, in the case of tract 11-A, the percentage of owner-occupants (21 percent) exceeds that of an adjacent, predominantly white neighborhood (18 percent). One finds, further, that rents in tract 11-A ($27.71 per month) were lower than the citywide median ($28.55) and lower than in one adjoining, predominantly white neighborhood ($33). Rents were lower than the citywide median in tract 21-B as well ($21.85 per month), although higher than in a nearby white neighborhood ($17.53). What were residents getting for their money, though? In 1950, 28 percent of all dwelling units across St. Louis had either “no private bath” or were deemed “dilapidated.” In 11-A, that figure was 30 percent. It was much higher in 21-B (56 percent), which was closer to that in an adjoining, overwhelmingly white neighborhood (44 percent). Poor sides of town existed in the St. Louis of 1950, in other words, that were white and Black.

One could argue that such numbers demonstrated the need for racially integrated public housing on a large, Pruitt-Igoe–type scale. But that argument would rest on the faulty assumptions of environmental determinists: that physical conditions should be the main gauge of the health of a community; that left to themselves, such conditions would be a permanent feature of urban life; and that the only steps that could make life better were demolition and relocation. Further, these assumptions clashed sharply with the views of those who began to critically examine “urban renewal” as early as the late 1950s and early 1960s, including the sociologist Gans. In his landmark book The Urban Villagers—an appreciation of Boston’s tenement West End district, based on research he conducted shortly before its demolition to make way for high-rise apartments—Gans writes, “The federal and local housing standards which are applied to slum areas reflect the value pattern of middle-class professionals [who] place greater emphasis on the status functions of housing than does the working class.”³⁷ Gans is not unalterably opposed to slum demolition and its replacement with publicly provided housing, but he is the first to express skepticism about just how bad areas branded as slums really were. He writes in The Urban Villagers:

But even by middle-class standards, the assumptions behind public housing—the conditions of which would become the benchmark for MTO and, by extension for the AFFH Rule—ignore a great many things, notably including the fact that ownership is, by definition, not an option in public housing and that asset ownership can lay the foundation for gradual movement up and out of poorer neighborhoods. Here lies what can be termed a “snapshot fallacy”: that the conditions observed at a given moment are permanent unless policy makers act. But the conditions for improvement were not absent in the poor Black neighborhoods of 1950 St. Louis.

Home values in Tract 11-A, for single-family units, were relatively similar to the citywide average ($8,026, compared with $9,220), suggesting the possibility of upward mobility for owners and sales to tenants, who might follow the owners up the housing ladder. And even in the pre–civil rights era, 24 percent of St. Louis Blacks (37,500 of 153,766) lived in majority-white neighborhoods of what was, in its social and racial mores, very much a Southern city, at a time when Jim Crow remained firmly in place in the United States. Private housing markets can disperse households based on their income and ability to pay, and they were starting to do so in the St. Louis of 1950. Rather than allow that process to take its course, public housing helped create a publicly subsidized Black ghetto and froze it in place for decades. Residents couldn’t become property owners and, with rents set low, lacked the financial incentive to get out. Those providing private, low-income housing (including many Black property owners) would, moreover, have logically found it difficult or impossible to compete against the government. Indeed, a good case can be made that African Americans were particularly disadvantaged by public housing because its advent and growth coincided with their migration from the rural South to the urban North.

One can argue, of course, that this sad history provides the rationale for compensating minority families in some way. The policy question, however, is not whether some intervention in low-income minority communities is justified but, rather, what sort of investments might actually improve matters for as many residents as possible.

What Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Overlooks: What Upward Mobility Requires

The neglected idea that low-income neighborhoods with modest homes could lay the foundation for upward mobility was, in fact, understood by some, even in the Progressive era. In their classic 1911 book Zone of Emergence, Albert Kennedy and Robert Woods, settlement house leaders in Boston’s South End, observe:

Thus, Woods and Kennedy, in contrast to such housing reformers as Edith Elmer Wood and Catherine Bauer, who emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, implicitly understand that the process of upward mobility (“emergence”) was itself integral to upward mobility itself. The steps that lead a household to a “better” neighborhood—work, savings, marriage—were, and are, encouraged by the private, socioeconomically stratified private housing market. It is thus that the so-called better neighborhoods are formed in the first place. By this logic, the process of doing what is required to move to a better neighborhood, then, is as important as relocation itself. Promoters of the AFFH Rule fail to understand this.

This, then, is an argument that the AFFH Rule—and the vision of assisting those of lower incomes through dispersion to higher-income neigh-borhoods—is yet another ill-advised response to what might be termed the original sin of public housing, at least as implemented over time, for which we continue to identify difficult and elaborate antidotes. If not through AFFH, however, how should we proceed in an effort to improve the life chances of low-income household members?

Poor Neighborhoods as Good Neighborhoods

The answer, broadly, begins with abandoning the idea that low-income neighborhoods cannot be good neighborhoods—that is, communities that lay the groundwork for upward mobility and can be desirable places to live in their own right. The pessimistic view that this is not possible was actually central to the original vision of HUD as a federal agency. In 1966, the inaugural HUD undersecretary, Robert Wood, told the National Association of Social Workers that “the historic role of the city has deteriorated badly. In some city neighborhoods, blight and poverty have gone hand in hand for generations, and the slum is no longer a way station. . . . [T]he bus has stopped running to the suburbs and the poor are increasingly insulated from the larger society.”⁴⁰ This assertion looks absurd, in retrospect. Nonetheless, HUD took the approach of what might be called “gilding the ghetto”—replacing privately owned housing with either public housing or subsidized housing owned by large, politically connected private or nonprofit owners.⁴¹

Such initiatives would, again, have competed with private, low-income owners, helping undermine their capacity to accumulate assets and move out and up. The right approach—then and now—was not to emphasize housing quality but, rather, to take steps to provide the high-quality public goods associated with “better” neighborhoods: good schools, safe streets, clean parks and playgrounds, reliable public transit. It is here where our emphasis must lie today, rather than with what are likely to be quixotic attempts of the minority poor to move to more affluent neighborhoods.

Amy Wax captures well the choice regarding public education, a key service for advocates of the AFFH Rule:

Wax expresses concern not only about the practicality of the dispersal model but about how it could lead to race and class tensions, not unlike what Gans observes regarding neighborhood integration. In expressing a preference for the “no excuses model,” she says:

She is far from alone in taking the view that public charter schools, especially, show positive results in educating disadvantaged populations and do so without geographic relocation of their households. As David Leonhardt has written in the New York Times, “Many charters have flourished, especially in places where traditional schools have struggled. This evidence comes from top academic researchers, studying a variety of places, including Washington, Boston, Denver, New Orleans, New York, Florida and Texas. The anecdotes about failed charters are real, but they’re not the norm.”⁴³

Beyond the specific issue of education for the disadvantaged, the emergence of a new and effective model for this crucial public good reminds us that, since the founding of HUD—the agency that eventually begat the AFFH Rule—a series of other effective policies to improve the quality of life in low-income neighborhoods in a number of ways have emerged. Public safety, notably, has been improved drastically as the result of so-called public order (aka “broken windows”) policing, such that crime rates in many cities (notably New York) have been sharply reduced. There is dispute as to which specific strategies aimed at crime prevention and reduction have been most effective, but few dispute that nonexogenous factors (i.e., specific new law enforcement approaches) play a role.⁴⁴ In other words, we have learned that we are not helpless to reduce crime in low-income neighborhoods. Business improvement districts, through which neighborhood commercial enterprises band together in a formal legal structure that takes steps to complement public services, have proven to be a means through which private business interests effectively take responsibility for the safety and upkeep of neighborhood shopping districts.⁴⁵ Private support for park maintenance (through so-called park conservancies) has improved this crucial amenity, either by directly assisting with maintenance in parks in low-income areas (for instance, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park) or by freeing public funds that would have been devoted to park maintenance in higher-income neighborhoods that can attract philanthropic support.

One can argue, of course, that the opportunity to move to a higher-income neighborhood with a superior set of public goods should be at least one of the options available to residents of lower-income neighborhoods. However attractive such an approach might be for some people, at least in theory, it is my view that it is an approach that is neither practical (on a large scale) nor one that sends a constructive message about the steps that are required for true upward mobility—anymore than one’s hitting the lottery sends a constructive message about how as many people as possible can lift their incomes.

Broadly, then, the experimental character of the AFFH Rule as well as its practical challenges, coupled with promising new means to improve the quality of life in low-income neighborhoods, means that this is not the time to give up on the possibility implied by HUD’s original mission: taking steps to make sure that poor neighborhoods are good neighborhoods. The approach of affirmatively furthering fair housing risks being a course of most resistance, while failing to touch the lives of the majority of the poor.

ENDNOTES

1. Douglas S. Massey, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007), 110–112.

2. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Final Rule, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, Federal Register, July 16, 2015.

3. Ibid., Executive Summary.

4. Jeffrey R. Kling, Jeffrey B. Liebman, and Lawrence F. Katz, “Experimental Analysis of Neighborhood Effects,” Econometrica 75, no. 1 (2007): 83–119.

5. Michael D. Eriksen and Amanda Ross, “Housing Vouchers and the Price of Rental Housing,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 7, no. 3 (August 2015): 154–176.

6. Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence F. Katz, “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment,” American Economic Review 106, no. 4 (April 2016): 855–902.

7. Morris A. Davis, Daniel A. Hartley, Jesse Gregory, and Kegon T. K. Tan, “Neighborhood Choices, Neighborhood Effects and Housing Vouchers,” Working Paper Series (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, January 11, 2017), 29, 43, available at https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedhwp/wp-2017-02.html.

8. Ingrid Gould Ellen, Keren Mertens Horn, and Amy Ellen Schwartz, “Why Don’t Housing Choice Voucher Recipients Live Near Better Schools? Insights from Big Data,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 35, no. 4 (2016): 884–905.

9. Davis et al., “Neighborhood Choices, Neighborhood Effects and Housing Vouchers,” 43.

10. Chetty, Hendren, and Katz, “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children.”

11. Robert A. Collinson, Ingrid Gould Ellen, and Jens Ludwig, “Low-Income Housing Policy,” in Economics of Means-Tested Transfer Programs in the United States, ed. Robert A. Moffitt, vol. II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 59–126.

12. G. Thomas Kingsley, “Trends in Housing Problems and Federal Housing Assistance,” Urban Institute, October 2017, available at https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/94146/trends-in-housing-problems-and-federal-housing-assistance.pdf.

13. Ibid.

14. Office of Management and Budget, “Agency Fact Sheet, FY 2017 Executive Budget,” n.d., available at https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/documents/huddoc?id=ProposedFY17FactSheet.pdf.

15. Ingrid Gould Ellen, Michael Suher, and Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, “Neighbors and Networks: The Role of Social Interactions on the Residential Choices of Housing Choice Voucher Holders,” 2016, quoted in Ingrid Gould Ellen, “What Do We Know about Housing Choice Vouchers?” Regional Science and Urban Economics 80 (2020): 1–5.

16. P. H. Rees, Residential Patterns in American Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of Geography, 1979).

17. Michael J. White, American Neighborhoods and Residential Differentiation (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988).

18. Anna Hardman and Yannis M. Ioannides, “Neighbors Income Distribution: Economic Segregation and Mixing in Urban Neighborhoods,” Journal of Housing Economics 13 (2004): 368–382.

19. Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Random House, 1967).

20. Comments posted in response to Sam Roberts, “Westchester Adds Housing to Desegregation Pact,” New York Times, August 10, 2009, sec. N.Y./ Region, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/nyregion/11settle.html.

21. Howard Husock, “Let’s End Housing Vouchers,” City Journal, Autumn 2000, available at https://www.city-journal.org/html/let%E2%80%99s-end-housing-vouchers-12152.html.

22. John F. Bauman, “Catherine Bauer: The Struggle for Modern Housing in America, 1930–1960,” in The Human Tradition in Urban America, ed. Roger Biles (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 164.

23. Alexander von Hoffman, Calling Upon the Genius: Housing Policy in the Great Society, Part Three (Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University, March 2010), available at https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/w10-6_von_hoffman.pdf.

24. Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972).

25. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

26. U.S. Commissioner of Labor Statistics, “Slums of the Cities,” 1892, 19.

27. Marilyn Thornton Williams, Washing “the Great Unwashed”: Public Baths in Urban America, 1840–1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991).

28. Ibid., 2.

29. This description can be found on the website of WNET, public television, available at https://www.thirteen.org/tenement/logcabin.html.

30. U.S. Immigration Commission, Immigrants in Cities: A Study of the Population of Selected Districts in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Milwaukee (Washington, DC: 1911 U.S. Immigration Commission, 1911), 560.

31. Ibid., 5.

32. The President’s Homes Commission, Report of the Committee on Improvement of Existing Houses and Elimination of Insanitary and Alley Houses (Washington, DC: President’s Homes Commission, 1909), 288.

33. U.S. Commissioner of Labor Statistics, “Slums of the Cities,” 86.

34. Ibid., 588.

35. Ibid., 121.

36. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, St. Louis, Missouri Census Tracts, Table 3, Characteristics of Dwelling Units by Census Tracts, 52.

37. Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1982), 309.

38. Ibid.

39. Albert J. Kennedy and Robert Woods, The Zone of Emergence: Observations of the Lower Middle and Upper Working Class Communities of Boston, 1905–1914 (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1969), 39; Leonard S. Rubinowitz and Elizabeth Trosman, “Affirmative Action and the American Dream: Implementing Fair Housing Policies in Federal Homeownership Programs,” Northwestern University Law Review 74, quoted in Howard Husock, “Rediscovering the Three-Decker House,” Public Interest (Winter 1990): 53.

40. Robert Wood, “Obligations of an Affluent Society” (May 27, 1966), quoted in Cato Institute, “The Inherent Flaws of HUD,” Policy Analysis (Cato Institute, December 22, 1997), 5.

41. Howard Husock and Tom Sheehan, “Making Money on the Ghetto,” Boston Phoenix, July 8, 1975.

42. Amy Wax, “Educating the Disadvantaged,” National Affairs, Spring 2017, 4.

43. David Leonhardt, “Opinion | School Vouchers Aren’t Working, but Choice Is,” New York Times, January 20, 2018, sec. Opinion, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/opinion/school-vouchers-charters-betsy-devos.html.

44. New York Police Department, “The Historic Reduction in Crime Rates in New York, 1990–2014,” n.d.; See also Hope Corman and Naci Mocan, “Carrots, Sticks, and Broken Windows,” Journal of Law and Economics 48, no. 1 (April 1, 2005): 235–266.

45. Goktug Morcol, Lorlene Hoyt, Jack W. Meek, and Ulf Zimmermann, “Business Improvement Districts: Research, Theories, and Controversies” (London: CRC Press, 2008), available at https://www.crcpress.com/Business-Improvement-Districts-Research-Theories-and-Controversies/Morcol-Hoyt-Meek-Zimmermann/p/book/9781420045765.