PRRAC Publications & PRRAC Authors

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

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.”

Introduction: “HUD has benefited enormously from strong civil rights advocacy, and many of HUD’s most important regulatory guidelines have emerged from this advocacy. We offer this selected timeline as a tribute to this ongoing history and, we hope, an inspiration to a new generation of civil rights and tenant activists.”

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 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.”

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 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, 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.”

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-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.”

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.

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 Philip Tegeler, Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, & Martha Bottia.

Excerpt: “The goals of promoting integration and avoiding racial isolation in K-12 education were recently reaffirmed as compelling government interests by five Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 (2007). That decision did strike down specific elements of voluntary plans in Seattle and Louisville; however, a majority of the Court indicated support for a wide range of race-conscious measures to promote school integration that do not assign individual students based on their race.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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”).”

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.”

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.

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.”

Excerpt: “Thompson v. HUD was filed in 1994 on behalf of a class of African American public housing residents. Like several other public housing desegregation cases, the Thompson case was triggered by the demolition of a high rise public housing development, with plans to locate replacement housing in neighborhoods with similar levels of segregation. And like many of the other cases, as part of the challenge to this policy of rebuilding the ghetto, the plaintiffs included a larger historical claim that the city and housing authority, with HUD approval, acted in concert over many decades to create a deeply segregated system of public housing, with project siting decisions largely driven by community opposition in white neighborhoods, in the context of a central city housing authority with limited jurisdiction over housing development outside its own city limits.” 

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.'”