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Feb 26, 2021 5:53 PM |
50 Years After Passage Of The Fair Housing Act, It’s Time To Sue The Suburbs
America’s Racist Housing Rules Really Can Be Fixed
Feb 17, 2021
By Jerusalem Demsas
Read More: https://www.vox.com/22252625/america...les-how-to-fix
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Neighborhoods matter. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews reported, researchers Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz found in 2016 that moving to a wealthier neighborhood not only increased the likelihood that kids would go to college, but also increased earnings by roughly 31 percent by the time they’d reached their mid-20s. — Single-family zoning, which means it’s illegal to build anything other than single-family homes, is prevalent in the suburb. Single-family homes are more expensive than apartments, townhomes, or duplexes, and that makes rent costly, too.
- Exclusionary zoning laws essentially trap many Black families into low-income neighborhoods by pricing them out of richer ones. — Ending residential segregation would allow Americans to move from poor neighborhoods or cities to richer ones and allow lower-skilled workers to find better-paying jobs. To put a number on it, exclusionary zoning has artificially inflated the price of housing so much that one paper estimated that from 1964 to 2009, it lowered aggregate growth by more than 50 percent. — This problem may feel like a tragedy of local governments and NIMBY-ism run amuck. But there’s actually a lot President Joe Biden’s administration can do about it right now. Biden can tie public concern over racial justice to tangible changes people can make at the local level. He can also tie federal dollars to mandates to reduce exclusionary zoning. And if all else fails, his administration can sue the jurisdictions that are knowingly perpetuating segregation.
- Comprehensive federal protections from housing discrimination wouldn’t come about until 1968. Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, an extraordinary piece of civil rights legislation that not only clarified that it was in fact illegal to discriminate due to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability, but also that the government had the obligation to “affirmatively further fair housing.” — Despite this mandate, zoning laws proliferated that have entrenched de facto discrimination. Instead of explicitly barring people due to their race, these laws have taken the form of regulations like minimum sizes for new homes, which effectively ban more affordable dwellings. Localities have also weaponized seemingly neutral regulations that make the cost of development so exorbitant that the only profitable type of homes to build are large or luxury units.
- Biden could help draw the racial justice connection for these communities by alleviating their concerns about property values, pointing to the environmental impact of sprawl, and making it clear that banning multi-family homes is in direct opposition to progressive goals around equal opportunity. — But this goes beyond appealing to suburbanites on progressive grounds. The overarching argument that needs to be made, not only to voters but to Democratic leaders in cities, counties, and states is an economic one. Residential segregation shrinks the pot, and increasingly even more affluent, white college graduates are feeling the squeeze as they struggle to find housing in high-opportunity cities. — Both fair housing lawyers and policy wonks say the Biden administration should work with jurisdictions to provide technical and planning assistance in its aims to rid itself of exclusionary zoning practices.
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