PRRAC Publications & PRRAC Authors

A PRRAC Report (April 2019)

Excerpt: “In summary, immigrant-origin youth are the fastest-growing student population in the country (Foxen, 2010) and are also more likely to be poor, experience residential mobility, and live in overcrowded housing than native-born children (e.g., Hernandez & Charney, 1998). In addition to language barriers, immigrant children often experience unique stressors associated with their migration (such as possible exposure to traumatic events preceding or during migration) and acculturation processes (Potochnick & Perreira, 2010) that make the study of immigrants extremely relevant to public policy. The current report provides an up-to-date summary of the literature on the relationship between school and residential segregation and immigrants’ outcomes.”

Published in University of Richmond Law Review.

Excerpt: “Strong leadership will be needed to counter our country’s increasing trend of racial and economic separation. This essay has argued that the greatest potential for addressing housing and school segregation is at the state government level, where most of the interlocking segregative structures reside. As our country’s continuing housing affordability crisis propels housing to the political front page over the next several years, now is the time to adopt innovative state civil rights strategies to accompany the housing and educational needs that will accompany a rapidly growing and increasingly economically unequal population. If we value diverse and unified communities, we cannot afford to simply replicate and intensify the legal structures of the past.”

Published in Metzger et al’s Facing Segregation: Housing Policy Solutions for a Stronger Society, Oxford University Press.

A PRRAC Report.

Excerpt: “School and neighborhood segregation are recognized as pernicious and persistent problems across the United States, originally developed through intentional government policies, and perpetuated today by both public policy and private markets that have adapted to segregated systems of housing, education, and transportation. Housing and school segregation function as mutually-sustaining phenomena that limit perceived housing and school choices, constrain social networks, and curb employment and educational potential. Despite the link between housing and school segregation, however, many initiatives combating segregation tend to focus on one or the other instead of recognizing their inherent connectedness.”

Published in Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law.

Excerpt: “Housing discrimination, program designs that entrench segregative patterns, and exclusionary zoning are significant problems that create lasting harm across generations. These issues require direct and specialized interventions. However, as the fair housing movement continues to grapple with segregation, we can benefit from efforts to broaden our advocacy work to encompass related fields. Other policies have a reciprocal effect on segregation. In addition, by working in partnership with advocates who focus on environmental justice, education, infrastructure equity, and other issues, many fair housing advocates are laying an important foundation for mutual support and for joint agendas that promote housing choice as well as other aspects of social equity.”

Prepared for PRRAC by Anthony Armstrong & Make Communities.

Excerpt: “In fact, Syracuse’s experience feels both unique and all too common for U.S. cities, particularly Great Lakes cities: federally sanctioned housing disinvestment; sprawling outward development; stagnating or declining and segregated population; fractured local government and school systems; and outdated infrastructure. Officials at public and private institutes have raised the flag that these issues serve as a deterrent to investment from external businesses and also as a deterrent to attracting and retaining talent to serve in available positions.”

By Jennifer Miyake-Trapp, Ed.D.

Excerpt: “Not so long ago, Sandy Roffman worked with a local realtor to purchase a home for her young family in Pasadena, California. While the realtor praised Pasadena’s neighborhoods and many amenities, she cautioned her clients about enrolling their children in the local public schools, sharing tales of dismal school conditions and poor performance. Fortunately, Ms. Roffman had her own set of personal experiences to counter the realtor’s negative perceptions. As PTA President of Jackson STEM Dual Language Magnet Academy, an elementary school in the Pasadena Unified School District, Ms. Roffman was intimately aware of the transformative educational opportunities offered to students. ‘It’s a shame,” reflected Ms. Roffman, ‘that the reputation of an entire school district can become so damaged by voices who have no clue what’s happening within it.'”

Published in Journal of Affordable Housing.

Excerpt: “Fair housing and environmental justice are deeply intertwined, though they have long operated in separate siloes among both policymakers and advocates. In recent years, the importance of connecting these issues has been brought home in acute ways. This included the public exposure of lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan (which gave momentum to successful efforts to raise HUD’s lead threshold), and the disastrous impacts of Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey (highlighting the need not only for emergency preparation, but also for proactive, equitable climate adaptations).”

Published in American Journal of Public Health.

Excerpt: “As the “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” planning process plays out across the country over the next six to seven years, public health advocates should consider how the new mandate can help more low-income families of color access high opportunity, healthier communities – and at the same time bring their public health expertise to the question of what specific public health interventions can promote healthier outcomes in high-poverty neighborhoods for future generations of children.”

Published in School Integration Matters: Research-Based Strategies to Advance Equity, Teachers College Press, Edited by Erica Frankenberg, Liliana M. Garces, and Megan Hopkins.

Excerpt: “Economic and racial segregation in housing fostered by federal, state, and local governments, alongside the systematic deprivation of public resources, creates areas of deep disadvantage. The relationship between segregated housing and access to an equitable educational opportunity is clear, with brain development research showing residential segregation and racial isolation can result in significant developmental impacts.”

Published in School Integration Matters: Research-Based Strategies to Advance Equity, Teachers College Press, Edited by Erica Frankenberg, Liliana M. Garces, and Megan Hopkins.

Excerpt: “The Department of Education has made great strides in its recent guidance documents on school discipline and resource disparities. The next step is to move from a complaint and enforcement model to a system that requires state and local grantees to consider the racial consequences of their actions before they are taken and to include an assessment of current and future patterns of segregation that largely drive racial disparities in resources and outcomes for low-income children.”

By Philip Tegeler, Dan Rinzler, Mary Cunningham, and Craig Pollack, San Francisco Federal Reserve.

Excerpt: “Our modeling shows that housing mobility could generate significant medical cost savings from improvements in adult diabetes and extreme obesity, the vast majority of which would accrue to government health programs such as Medicaid given the low incomes of families with housing vouchers. We also conclude that it is possible that housing mobility could pay for itself, along with other legal and evaluation costs associated with PFS financing, based on medical cost saving.”

A PRRAC Report.

Excerpt:“Increasingly, Americans are using online rental listing sites to aid their housing search. This is true of Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) holders as well as for the public at large. Update-to-date online listings for HCV holders provide benefits that traditional landlord lists maintained by the Public Housing Authority (PHA) cannot, such as detailed information about units, pictures of the interior and exterior of units and mapping features. Websites that cater to voucher clients can provide a much-needed resource for renters. However, if the websites are not providing clients access to a full range of neighborhoods, including lower poverty, less segregated neighborhoods, they are not helping achieve the goals of the voucher program.”

A PRRAC Policy Brief.

Excerpt: “This policy brief examines the three recent multi-billion dollar settlements reached by the U.S. government with J.P. Morgan, Citibank, and Bank of America in the context of the government’s duty, under the Fair Housing Act, to promote residential integration in its housing programs and investments. This legal duty to “affirmatively further fair housing” applies to all of the government entities involved in the bank settlements, including the Treasury Department, the Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD).”

A PRRAC Report.

Synopsis: Despite growing interest, policymaking, and funding for the inclusion of affordable housing in TODs, this study finds that limited progress has been made over the past two decades in delivering new affordable housing options near transit stations in high-opportunity neighborhoods. Perhaps because of the need for dense neighborhoods to support ridership combined with the nature of urban poverty and housing policy in the United States, over half of new transit stations have been located in neighborhoods where affordable housing is already located. New transit neighborhoods have not been as successful at attracting new affordable developments, however; we found that in neighborhoods where transit stations opened since 2000 only one in five saw new affordable units added. Combined with our findings that transit-rich neighborhoods were more likely to experience demographic shifts signaling gentrification pressures, and with previous findings that transit neighborhoods were at risk of losing federally subsidized units, these findings create cause for concern of the future for equitable TODs.

A PRRAC Report, with the Center for Urban Research and Learning, Loyola University Chicago, & the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council.

Excerpt: “This report examines an innovative program in Milwaukee County that can help address these disparities and assist the HCVP in expanding its potential to help families and children reach higher opportunity neighborhoods. The Milwaukee County HOME Security Deposit Assistance Program (SDAP) provides families in the voucher program with a grant of up to $1,000 that can be used to pay for their security deposit, but only on housing units in suburban municipalities outside of the City of Milwaukee. These suburbs are overwhelmingly white and low-poverty (see Table 3 and Figure 1). The Milwaukee County program was originally developed to assist families facing financial barriers to moving after an unexpected loss of their current housing. But because of geographic restrictions attached to the Security Deposit (related to funding program jurisdiction), and the lack of any other significant “mobility counseling” efforts by the county PHA, the program presents an opportunity to study a particular kind of targeted intervention to facilitate moves by HCV families to lower-poverty areas and meet the goal of affirmatively furthering fair housing.”

Published in University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform.

Excerpt: “The Department of Education already has the policy levers it needs to engage more forcefully with states and local districts to promote school diversity and reduce racial and economic isolation in public schools. The Department can exercise its unused Title VI authority to require states and districts, as a basic condition of Title I funding, to undertake proactive equity assessments that include an analysis of the discriminatory and segregative impacts of major policy and funding decisions, and to take steps to ameliorate these impacts. It can use its competitive grant programs to encourage innovative efforts to reduce racial and economic isolation of students at the state and local level, and it can require regular data reporting that will demonstrate whether a state or district is moving toward greater segregation or integration. The Department’s existing statutory framework authorizes and even encourages all of these actions. The Department of Education’s ongoing refusal to act within its existing authority to encourage integration is a denial of the “moral and ethical obligation” that Justice Kennedy described in Parents Involved.”

A PRRAC Publication. Foreword by Rep. Luis Gutierrez.

Synopsis: The book is a compilation of the best and still-most-relevant articles published in Poverty & Race, the bimonthly of The Poverty & Race Research Action Council from 2006 to the present. Authors are some of the leading figures in a range of activities around these themes. It is the fourth such book PRRAC has published over the years, each with a high-visibility foreword writer: Rep. John Lewis, Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. Bill Bradley, Julian Bond in previous books, Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Chicago for this book. The chapters are organized into four sections: Race & Poverty: The Structural Underpinnings; Deconstructing Poverty and Racial Inequities; Re(emerging) Issues; Civil Rights History.

A PRRAC & Abt Associates Inc. Report.

Excerpt: “The Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is a federal program administered by the Treasury Department that subsidizes the development of rental housing projects for low-income households. LIHTC is the predominant “supply-side” or “project-based” component of U.S. rental housing policy, while the “demand-side” or “tenant-based” component is the Housing Choice Voucher program, providing subsidies that households can use to rent housing units they find in the private market. Since its creation by the Tax Reform Act of 1986, LIHTC has developed about 2.4 million units; since the early 1990s, LIHTC has been the only program that has added substantial numbers of subsidized projects to the U.S. rental housing stock. The housing voucher program currently assists about 2.5 million households—with some overlap, since vouchers frequently are used to rent units in LIHTC projects [Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy 2012]. This paper is based on the premise that an effort is needed to create a better balance between locating LIHTC projects in “high-opportunity” communities and locating them in neighborhoods where substantial numbers of poor people and minorities currently live. After examining the basis of that premise, the paper then focuses on the way in which the administrators of LIHTC—agencies of state governments—can use the systems through which they allocate tax credit authority to change the balance of LIHTC locations so that the program does a better job of helping low-income families and racial minorities live in areas with good schools, superior public services and health care, and access to jobs.”

A PRRAC Report.

Excerpt: “Existing research on the residential outcomes of assisted households finds that on average assisted households live in disadvantaged neighborhoods (Newman and Schnare, 1997; Pendall, 2000; Freeman, 2003; Galvez, 2011). This analysis pushes the question a step further and probes whether housing assistance has the potential to break the cycle of poverty through breaking the link between poor households and low performing schools. Unfortunately, we find that this does not generally appear to be the case; though we find some metropolitan areas where assisted households are living near relatively high performing schools relative to other households in the same metropolitan area. These metropolitan areas tend to be located in the South and West, and to have both smaller populations and lower levels of racial segregation.”

A PRRAC-National Housing Law Project Report.

Excerpt: “It is evident that San Francisco will continue to need to be inventive and its housing advocates strong to meet the challenges ahead. Some advocates are already looking beyond the Trust Fund to the new frontier of housing policy. Building on development limitation and job-housing balance ideas from Proposition M and the phasing and linkage of different types of development demanded by the more equitable and inclusive recent redevelopment projects, they are formulating a plan to link approval of market-rate housing to meet the affordability goals set by ABAG described above. San Francisco continues to evolve its policy to fill in the gaps in its housing needs and find creative and substantial sources of funding to develop and maintain affordable housing. By also ensuring that the needs of local residents are heard, San Francisco is demonstrating that the early urban renewal and displacement days are gone and have been replaced with a vision of creating the housing, jobs and services required to maintain and rebuild vibrant, diverse and thriving communities within the City.”

A PRRAC-Century Foundation Report.

Excerpt: “The education policy and philanthropy communities to date have placed a premium on funding charter schools that have high concentrations of poverty and large numbers of minority students. This report asks: Might it make more sense for foundations and policymakers to embrace a variety of approaches, including efforts to demonstrate the feasibility and value of racially and economically integrated charter schools?”

By Philip Tegeler, Henry Korman, Jason Reece, and Megan Haberle.

Synopsis: This paper is intended to present a civil rights perspective on the federal policy discussion currently underway seeking to harmonize various subsidized housing development rules across the three agencies that sponsor low-income housing (HUD, the Treasury Department, and the Department of Agriculture). This “compliance harmonization” initiative has so far avoided taking on the difficult question of site selection rules in our largest low-income housing development program, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), administered by the IRS and the Treasury Department. In the discussion that follows we will suggest alternative approaches to civil rights site selection in the LIHTC program that are consistent with the statutory guidance for the program, and that also can integrate successfully with other important goals such as sustainability and transit access.

A PRRAC-NCSD Report.

Excerpt: “Families who participated in the Baltimore Mobility Program experienced radical changes in their local neighborhood contexts, moving from poor and segregated areas to mixed race, low poverty communities. In this paper, we look at the changes in educational opportunity that accompanied these moves. Given the demonstrated link between residential segregation and school quality, we would expect that giving families the opportunity to move to non-segregated, low poverty neighborhoods would increase access to higher quality school environments. As we show, this is exactly what has happened—the moves that families made with the program greatly increased the quality of the schools their children can attend, as measured by increases in the academic performance of the student body and teacher qualifications, as well as large decreases the poverty rate of the schools. These findings are significant for potential long-term outcomes from the program, as research suggests that middle-class schools can positively influence student achievement. For example, Schwartz’s recent findings that children from low-income families in Montgomery County, Maryland benefit from attending low-poverty schools might be especially relevant to the Baltimore Mobility Program. Children in the Baltimore Program have the opportunity to experience even more dramatic changes in school poverty level as a result of the program, which allows them to move from some of the poorest schools in the state to ones that are similar to those Schwartz found to be beneficial for increasing achievement.”

By Rolf Pendall, Elizabeth Davies, Lesley Freiman, and Rob Pitingolo.

Excerpt: “This report tracks the stubborn persistence of concentrated poverty—poverty rates over 30 percent—in U.S. metropolitan areas over a period of nearly 40 years. Neighborhoods with poverty rates above 30 percent have been recognized as places with few opportunities for employment and education, high levels of disinvestment and crime, and meager civic participation. Living in such neighborhoods over extended periods reduces the life chances of children, whether their families are poor or not. The report also looks more deeply at a subset of urban neighborhoods that can be characterized as the “original ghetto,” extensive areas whose cores were almost exclusively nonwhite and poor in 1970. The report shows that the nation continues to suffer from racially and economically divided cities, and this segregation undercuts efforts to reach important goals for health, education, employment, and civic engagement.”

By David Rusk.

Excerpt: “HUD’s new “Sustainable Communities Initiative” (SCI) represents the best of the new administration – looking forward creatively towards a new metropolitan future, and crossing bureaucratic silos to engage transportation policy, environmental policy, and housing policy in the same program. However, the SCI program also demonstrates the potential pitfalls of trying to move progressive policies without engaging the real continuing divisions of race and class in our society. We believe that the SCI program has the potential to advance the goal of racially and economically integrated and environmentally sustainable regions. However, to achieve this goal, the program needs to take these issues on explicitly.”

By Lora Engdahl.

Excerpt: “In the Baltimore region, a successful housing mobility program is providing families living in very disadvantaged inner-city communities with a new home and a chance for a new life. Minority voucher holders in the federal Housing Choice Voucher Program (formerly titled Section 8) have often been limited to living in “voucher submarkets” where racial and economic segregation is high and opportunities are limited. The Baltimore Housing Mobility Program, a specialized regional voucher program operating with deliberate attention to expanding fair housing choice, has overcome some of the biggest barriers to using vouchers in suburban and city neighborhoods where opportunities are abundant. The program’s results-oriented approach has produced a replicable set of best practices for mobility programs while presenting an important model for reform of the national Housing Choice Voucher Program. This report, New Homes, New Neighborhoods, New Schools: A Progress Report on the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program, provides the first-ever comprehensive description of the program.”

A PRRAC Report.

Excerpt: “Access to improved opportunities in employment, education, and even health are greatly influenced by housing location. Today, we are at a critical moment in housing mobility policy. Though more research is necessary, we now know a good deal about the benefits of mobility for families who choose to move to lower poverty, higher opportunity communities. We also know more about what is needed to make housing mobility programs work even better for families who move. This resource guide seeks to highlight some best practices for incorporating health, education, and employment supports into the voucher process to help families connect more effectively to opportunities in their new communities. It is our observation that such connections can assist families to withstand initial difficulties of a move to a new community, and remain in the community (and new school) for a long time, through high school graduation and beyond.”

Published in Lexington Books, 2009.

Synopsis: A set of essays for Mandate for Change. The volume offers a set of specific policy proposals for the incoming national administration on every major domestic and international topic, written specifically for the book by leading thinkers and activists in the field.

Published in Building Healthy Communities: A Guide to Community Economic Development for Advocates, Lawyers, and Policymakers, co-edited by Roger Clay and Susan Jones.

Synopsis: The 530-page volume contains 28 chapters divided into the following sections: History & Background; CED & the Global Economy; Nonprofit Orgs. in CED; Govt. Financial Resources; Responding to Comm. Interests; Building Human Capital; Creating Indiv. & Comm. Assets; Obtaining Appropriate Financial Services; Embracing Environmental Opportunities & Challenges. Full TOC and ordering inf (unfortunately at a pricey $125) available at www.ababooks.org.

By Philip Tegeler, Susan Eaton, and Westra Miller.

Excerpt: “Research and on the ground experience in our urban areas demonstrates that it is time to more deliberately link school and housing policy in efforts to reduce concentrated poverty, promote school diversity and revitalize communities that have historically been disenfranchised. The history of housing discrimination, and of increasing poverty and segregation in our public schools today, makes this all the more urgent. One sensible route toward such collaboration is combining magnet school efforts and the HOPE VI program to deconcentrate poverty in neighborhoods and schools. The programs share a common goal and have established infrastructures and generally positive reputations. Such an effort is compatible with the Justice Reinvestment movement, which seeks to assist communities of concentrated disadvantage, which have long been overlooked and marginalized. Examples of similar cooperative efforts show considerable promise as road maps in moving such collaborative efforts to scale. Our roundtable in Tampa allowed us to move from an idea toward more concrete proposals for policy reform, as spelled out in the Appendix that follows.”

Published in Public Housing and the Legacy of Segregation, edited by Margery Austin Turner, Susan J. Popkin, and Lynette Rawlings (Urban Institute Press Report).

Excerpt: “Concentrated poverty and racial isolation persist in American cities. Recent data show that while the proportion of poor black and Latino families living in high-poverty neighborhoods declined between 1960 and 2000, the relative isolation of these groups, compared to whites, increased during the same period.”

Synopsis: The National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity is an independent Commission charged with assessing the current state of fair housing in America and making recommendations for a revived federal commitment to fair housing. The Commission is sponsored by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, the National Fair Housing Alliance and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and is co-chaired by former HUD Secretaries Henry Cisneros and Jack Kemp. Over the course of hearings in 5 cities, the Commission has heard testimony on serious problems in fair housing enforcement, the need for stronger fair housing oversight of HUD grantees, origins and solutions to the foreclosure crisis, the relation between school and housing segregation, and the structural impediments to fair housing in federal and state housing programs.

An Updated Fifty-State Review of LIHTC “Qualified Allocation Plans.”

Excerpt: “The “best practices” highlighted in this report are meant as a starting point for a discussion about how to move the Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program towards improved compliance with the Fair Housing Act. Of course, state Housing Finance Agencies will ultimately be judged not on what their plans say on paper, but on how well their programs do in promoting integrated housing choices in a variety of communities – especially communities with safe streets, high quality schools, and ample employment opportunities – and to ensure that this housing is truly open and accessible to low income families of color and persons with disabilities. To achieve this, we believe that state HFAs will need to play a more assertive role in demanding fair housing performance within the development and housing management communities, especially on issues of siting and tenant selection. The Department of Treasury, which oversees the program, will also be called upon to play a stronger role. It is our hope that the examples described in this report will help move us towards these goals.”

Excerpt: “The goal of this directory is to provide a snapshot of a rapidly evolving community of advocates, organizers, and public health professionals working in different ways on the issue of unequal health outcomes for people of color in the U.S., and to establish new connections and networks within and across states. Some of these connections are between researchers and advocates, and others will be among organizations working on different aspects of the health disparities challenge – which involves not just unequal access to quality healthcare, but also a range of social and environmental influences that are beyond the traditional reach of the health care system.”

A Report to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Submitted by U.S. Housing Scholars and Research and Advocacy Organizations.

Excerpt: “Residential segregation is an insidious and persistent fact of American life. Discrimination on the basis of race, while on the decline according to some estimates, continues to pervade nearly every aspect of the housing market in the United States. This shadow report evaluates the current state of housing discrimination and segregation and the United States government’s failure to fulfill its obligations related to housing under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (“CERD”).”

A Report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Submitted by the CERD Working Group on Health and Environmental Health.

Excerpt: “It is now widely recognized that racial and ethnic disparities in health outcomes in the U.S. are caused not only by structural inequities in our health care systems, but also by a wide range of social and environmental determinants of health. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) recognizes and encompasses this dual analysis in the area of public health.”

Published in All Things Being Equal: Instigating Opportunity in an Equitable Time (New Press).

Excerpt: “In the twenty years since the first studies of the Gautreaux mobility program began to be published, our understanding of housing mobility has become increasingly sophisticated. These programs are not the ultimate “solution” to urban poverty and segregation, but they are crucially important for the families who choose to participate, and they are an important step toward more equitable and integrated metropolitan regions. There will surely be a need for further research, but we have learned enough about the dynamics of housing mobility and its relation to health, education, child development, and employment, to begin to design the next generation of housing mobility programs.”

A PRRAC Report.

Excerpt: “The racial segregation and inequality of the Boston metropolitan area is well-documented. This is true when examining residential patterns, the workforce, and educational access and opportunity. The tumultuous school desegregation battle that was waged in Boston gained national headlines in the 1970s, and decades later large shares of Boston area minority residents report that they feel unwelcome in a Boston metropolitan area that is overwhelmingly white. Given this landscape, perhaps it is not surprising that Boston’s urban-suburban school desegregation program—begun by black leaders and parents as “a partial and temporary remedy” to the segregated, unequal Boston schools in the mid-1960s—recently celebrated its 40th anniversary. Its longevity and popularity demonstrate its importance to generations of Boston-area families.”

A PRRAC Report.

Excerpt: “The Project Choice program, which provides integrated school opportunities for Hartford schoolchildren throughout the region, is an integral part of the State of Connecticut’s response to the 1996 Sheff v. O’Neill school decision. The Choice program has been overshadowed by the larger interdistrict magnet school program, but like the magnet program, Project Choice has also lagged in its growth – leaving the state well short of its desegregation goals. Simply put, suburban districts in the region have not yet provided a sufficient number of seats to meet the student demand for the program. However, local districts do not make such decisions in a vacuum – there are important issues of funding, transportation, student support, coordination and capacity that have to be addressed by the state before the program can grow to its full potential. This study explored these issues in depth and includes recommendations to improve and expand the Project Choice program for participating towns and students.”

Edited by Marcheta Gillam, Steve Fischbach, Lynne Wolf, Nkiru Azikiwe, and Philip Tegeler.

Excerpt: “Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma opened our eyes to vast poverty in our rich nation. The storms and the flooding from New Orleans’ broken levees drew national attention to this poverty, albeit briefly and without an explanation of why so many of our poor are people of color and what it means for all of us. While New Orleans certainly has a unique history and culture, its racialized poverty and history of disinvestment in communities of color is not unique. The story of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is also the story of cities throughout our country.”

Published in The Erosion of Rights: Declining Civil Rights Enforcement Under the Bush Administration (A Citizen’s Commission on Civil Rights Report).

Synopsis: All government housing programs operate in the context of housing markets that tend to sort people by race and class, a tendency that is further distorted by government interventions like delegation of zoning authority to local jurisdictions, drawing of school district boundaries, siting of public housing, and subsidization of sprawl to distort property values on the metropolitan periphery.

By Jill Khadduri, Larry Buron, and Carissa Climaco.

Excerpt: “The Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) produced nearly 1.3 million units of rental housing between the start of the program, in 1987, and 2003, surpassing the size of the public housing program. In recent years, some 100,000 units per year have been “placed in service,” which means that construction was completed and families and individuals were able to live in the units (Climaco, Nolden, et al., 2006). At that pace, the total number of US rental housing units produced by the LIHTC is projected to have reached 1.5 million by 2005.”

Temple University Press.

Excerpt:“In the 1949 Housing Act, Congress declared ‘a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family’ our national housing goal. Today, little more than half a century later, upwards of 100 million people in the United States live in housing that is physically inadequate, unsafe, overcrowded, or unaffordable. The contributors to A Right to Housing consider the key issues related to America’s housing crisis, including income inequality and insecurity, segregation and discrimination, the rights of the elderly, as well as legislative and judicial responses to homelessness. The book offers a detailed examination of how access to adequate housing is directly related to economic security. With essays by leading activists and scholars, this book presents a powerful and compelling analysis of the persistent inability of the U.S. to meet many of its citizens’ housing needs, and a comprehensive proposal for progressive change.”

The 3rd “Best of Poverty & Race” volume edited by Chester Hartman with a foreword by Rep. Jesse L. Jackson, Jr.

Description: Features over six dozen pieces originally published in Poverty & Race between mid-2001 and 2005, with sections covering Race/Racism, Poverty, Education, Housing, Health, and Democracy. The 91 contributors to the collection represent the best of progressive thought and activism on America’s two most salient, and seemingly intractable, domestic problems.

Published in Routledge.

Synopsis: There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster is the first comprehensive critical book on the catastrophic impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. The disaster will go down on record as one of the worst in American history, not least because of the government’s inept and cavalier response. But it is also a huge story for other reasons; the impact of the hurricane was uneven, and race and class were deeply implicated in the unevenness.

Edited by Philip Tegeler, Mary Cunningham, and Margery Austin Taylor.

Excerpt: “This report is an attempt to capture—and update—the best insights of the Third National Conference on Housing Mobility, hosted by the Poverty & Race Research Action Council and held at the Urban Institute in December 2004. The authors represented in this report are a cross-section of scholars and activists working to improve housing choices for low-income families. Although the details are often complex, the basic messages of the report are simple: housing mobility works; it is feasible to implement; and it is now at great risk of being dismantled as a federal policy.”

Published in Next American City.

Excerpt: “THIS PAST JANUARY, A FEDERAL JUDGE in Baltimore, Marvin Garbis, issued a major housing desegregation ruling that explores the ways in which many American metropolitan areas have become—and stay—so racially and economically segregated. The lawsuit, Thompson v. HUD, was filed by the Maryland ACLU more than ten years earlier, on behalf of a class of African-American public housing residents in Baltimore. Thompson challenged the government’s policy of socially engineering the ghetto: the plaintiffs claimed that the city and housing authority acted in concert with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) over many decades to create a deeply segregated system of public housing, one in which project siting decisions were largely driven by the desire to avoid community opposition in white neighborhoods. Attorneys were already preparing for the case in the early-1990s, but expedited their filing of it when the Baltimore city government demolished a high-rise public housing development and made plans to locate replacement housing in neighborhoods with similar levels of segregation. In its decision, the court did not find the city and local housing authority liable, but instead focused responsibility squarely on HUD, which had both the power and duty to provide housing choices for low-income African American residents outside of segregated, high poverty zones in the city.”

Published in The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America (2005). Edited by Xavier de Souza Briggs, Brookings Press.

Description: The book explores the many facets of metropolitan segregation and opportunity and provides an excellent overview of the most important new research and policy work in this area.

A PRRAC Report. By Arnold R. Hirsch, Department of History University of New Orleans.

Excerpt: “It has been more than a generation since the Kerner Commission rendered its judgment on the riotous 1960s. Stunning then, passe now, the exhaustive report on urban America’s defining mid-century civil disturbances pointed an accusatory finger at the nation’s dominant majority. In words both familiar and forgotten, the investigative tribunal charged that “white society [was] deeply implicated in the ghetto.” “White institutions created it,” the Commission concluded, “white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

A PRRAC Report.

Excerpt:“In July of 1963, the administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA), Robert C. Weaver, spoke to a meeting of his Intergroup Relations Service (IRS), the “race relations” staff charged with promoting non-discrimination in federal housing programs. His talk came at a time of dramatic change in the federal government’s relationship to metropolitan development. After three decades of condoning and even actively promoting the racial segregation of neighborhoods, federal officials began, in the early 1960s, to declare their commitment to open occupancy and the promotion of ‘fair housing.'”

Foreword by Congressman John Lewis.

Synopsis: Interactive, interdisciplinary lessons, readings, photographs, primary documents, and interviews, with sections on education, labor, citizenship, culture, and reflections on teaching about the Civil Rights Movement. By putting the Movement back into civil rights teaching, we hope to help students find their connection to history and learn about the roles they can play in fighting injustice today. This publication challenges many of the myths about the Movement, making it clear, for example, that the Movement was made by thousands of people and organizations — not only a few exceptional heroes.

A PRRAC Publication with a foreword by Wendy Puriefoy of The Public Education Network.

Synopsis: Drawing on the material from the Winter 2003 Journal of Negro Education (“Student Mobility: How Some Children Get Left Behind”), co-edited by PRRAC’s Founder/past Director of Research Chester Hartman, Fragmented outlines the specific classroom mobility issues faced by low-income and minority students, especially homeless, immigrant, farmworker, special ed and foster children; and provides a series of specific action steps to ameliorate this problem — drawn from “best practices” case studies from Chicago, Texas, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Dept. of Defense schools.

Published in the winter 2003 issue of The Journal of Negro Education.

Excerpt: “High student mobility is a serious, under-recognized education problem. Classrooms, particularly those in low-income and minority areas, may have 50-75% turnover within the academic year. Homeless, immigrant, farmworker, special education, and foster children are especially impacted. The major education reforms put forward — smaller classes and schools, lower teacher/student ratios, better-trained teachers, improved physical plant and facilities, increased emphasis on testing and accountability, etc. — all are undermined, if not made irrelevant if the classroom is a revolving door. Stable students, teachers, administrators, and the school itself all suffer. This special issue of the JNE stresses the role of housing instability as the principal cause of school instability, focusing as well on internal school factors. Individual chapters treat the special conditions and needs of various student subpopulations affected. And a series of five “best practices” case studies — from Chicago, Minneapolis, Texas, California, and Department of Defense schools — illustrate the range of needed reforms.”

Published in Housing Policy Debate (2003).

Synopsis: The article reviews definitional issues, the available data on evictions — particularly as they affect lower-income and minority tenants — and model efforts to reduce the incidence and impact of evictions. The article ends with a call for developing a national database on evictions: who’s being evicted, for what reason, and what happens to evictees.

Published in Shelterforce.

Description: Review of the Millennial Housing Commission’s report,  “Meeting Our Nation’s Housing Challenges.”

Synopsis: Nearly a decade ago, the HOPE VI program was launched to address the most troubled portion of the public housing stock, the small percentage of public housing sites that were “severely distressed.” HOPE VI is a competitive grant program, under which public housing authorities (PHAs), local entities that administer federal housing programs, apply to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for funding to redevelop or demolish public housing sites. While it was intended to be a solution to severely distressed public housing, HOPE VI has been the source of new problems as serious as those it was created to address.

A PRRAC Publication, with a foreword by John Lewis.

Description: A second volume of the best articles and symposia from Poverty & Race, our bimonthly publication, on the country’s two most important, and seemingly intractable, social problems – and the added impact when they intersect.

A PRRAC Report.

Excerpt:“American cities experienced dramatic change in the decades after the Second World War. These changes included the massive deconcentration of central city population, the shift of economic activities to the suburban periphery, the deindustrialization or redistribution of metropolitan manufacturing, and a racial turnover of population that left many of the largest American cities with a majority black population well before the end of the twentieth century. Various government policies contributed to these large-scale changes, such as tax and mortgage policies, public housing programs, and urban redevelopment schemes.”

A PRRAC Publication, in collaboration with Sandra Paik; Foreword by Judith Johnson.

Description: A spin-off of our prior conference, “Effective Education for Low-Income and Minority Students.” This handbook is aimed at education reformers within and outside of the system.

Edited by Chester Hartman, Foreword by Bill Bradley, Preface by Julian Bond.

Description: The best articles and symposia from Poverty & Race, our bimonthly publication, on the country’s two most important, and seemingly intractable, social problems, and the added impact when they intersect.