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| Property closed MBWTE/Shutterstock.com city lab.com |
Today we return to the subject of suburbia. Specifically, we are going to look at how segregation is returning to the suburbs. Amanda Kolson Hurley of CityLab recently interviewed Myron Orfield, the director of the Institute for Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota, for her article "The Problem of Resegregation in Suburbia."
Myron Orfield is a civil-rights attorney, a former state legislator, professor, the author of books on regional governance and suburban development. In 2012, Mr. Orfield co-wrote a paper in which he described the state of integration in American suburbs as "fragile" and called for more enforcement of the Fair Housing Act to end illegal practices such as mortgage discrimination and racial steering. Two years later, Mr. Orfield published a paper examining the reasons for segregation in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and their suburbs. This prosperous regions is deeply segregated. Ms. Kolson Hurley writes, "Orfield helped a group of Minneapolis inner-ring suburbs file a complaint with HUD over the state's allocation of affordable housing in their jurisdiction (they allege they have more than their fair share of it, while whiter, wealthier suburbs are allocated less)." Mr. Orfield's prescriptions for integrations and opinions on affordable are polarizing locally. The following are excerpts from CityLab's interview with Myron Orfield.
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| Myron Orfield law.unn.edu |
Myron Orfield: There were a lot of, I think, pretty formative experiences. One was running for the legislature I was running in a district where part of it was desegregating and part of it was gentrified...I had a very strong sense, having grown up in this place, what it was like when it had integrated schools and neighborhoods. After I finished law school, I taught in the University of Chicago...I spent two years [studying] the Chicago court system. That experience, to see, a totally, completely, wickedly segregated system.
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| Illustration os spatial segregation delta.tundelft.nl |
AKH: You've written that diverse suburbs are more common than a lot of people realize, but you all characterize them as quite fragile.
MO: One of the things that was interesting: about 44 percent of the people who lived in the suburbs in the United States lived in racially integrated suburbs. The suburbs of the United States were much more integrated than the cities....You had these places that are suddenly integrated, and they're very big, and they're very important.
This is where race relations in the United States are the best. These are governments that to be bipartisan and do a pretty good job, provide pretty high-level services or pretty affordable taxes...That's the good news. The bad news is that we don't really deal with housing discrimination as much as we should.
There are all sorts of things that changed with the Fair Housing Act, but we still don't do anything about steering. Steering is rampant. There are all sorts of studies that show that black middle-class families are steered to parts of the suburbs where schools are racially integrated and white families are told that those same schools are no good. Mortgage lending discrimination is terrible. A black family that earns $157,000 is less likely to qualify for a prime loan than a white family that earns $40,000....Black people, even if they saw these place and were shown them by realtors, they can't get the jumbo loans.
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| The Resegregation of Suburban Schools Edited by Erica Frankenberg and Gary Orfield civil-rightsproject.ucla.edu |
AKH: What is the threshold where integration become resegregation?
MO: Our research finds that neighborhoods that are more than about 30 percent non-white, within a couple of decades, two-thirds of them will become predominantly non-white. Neighborhoods that are less than one-thirds non-white in more than a decade will remain integrated.
The 30 percent is when you're thinking about trying place, when you look at court decisions or school decisions...they try to locate as much affordable housing that are 70-percent white or more that aren't in the pattern of transition.
AKH: Can we change people's preference about where to live?
MO: We have to. The experience shows that when people have a chance to I've in stably integrated communities or they have a chance their kids to stably integrates schools, their preferences changes,...I've studied 16 places that have metro-wide schoo desegregation, and white flight essentially stopped in these places. The Supreme Court overturned the metropolitan [school desegregated] remedy in Detroit but allow the Louisville one to stand. All the neighborhoods that were integrated in Louisville in 1970 are still integrate. None of the neighborhoods that were integrated in Detroit in 1970 are still integrated...
AKH: Are there other examples of places that have maintained or manages integrated relatively well to this point?
MO: Portland and Seattle...
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| Seattle, Washington caper.com |
AKH: They don't have that many minorities, though
MO: They have the same percentage as Minneapolis. We wrote this article called "Why Are the Twin Cities So Segregated?"...[Minneapolis has] 90 schools that are more than 90 percent non-white. Portland has 2, and Seattle has got 25, even though they've go a million people than we have.
AKH: The difference--
MO: It's the poverty housing industry...They never got the poverty housing industry.
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| Portland, Oregon light rail Flickr user Trimet via Creative Commons citylab.com |
AKH: You're very critical of affordable housing developers [who Orfield terms the 'poverty housing industry]. A lot of people would say those developers are just trying to build housing for people in their neighborhoods or close to where their connections are. What's wrong with that?
MO: In lots of places, there's no movement to build in whites suburbs. There's no framework for integration. When these [developers] is when they pull apart or resist movements toward integration. These big groups want to keep all those resources dedicated to poor neighborhoods.
AKH: Why is that?
MO: My analysis is that they have got a very strong business model that really works for them in poor neighborhoods...There's multiple sources of funding that aren't available other places, because the cities usually chip in, the foundations chip in. If you build in a white suburbs, you've got to got to 20 or 30 or 50 meetings, and your profit margins are going to be smaller.
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| Minneapolis Warehouse District Minneapolis, Minnesota en.wikipedia.org |
AKH: it sounds like they're pretty efficient at delivering housing on the model they've developed.
MO: No--it's very expensive. If you're going to build a unit in North Minneapolis, it's going to cost $400,000. If you build in Eagen..., it's going to be $133,000. {Critics] characterize my positions as saying there should no affordable housing built in central cities...I just say you have to build somewhat more of the affordable housing in a pro-integrative way...moving the ball forward on integration.
AKH: Why not just launch an all-out assault on redlining and the the lack of investment in majority-minority neighborhoods?
MO: I always figure this spatial inequality is based on six things at least:...steering,...,mortgage lending discrimination,..., discrimination by buyers and sellers. Then the government builds all the affordable housing in poor neighborhoods. The school districts always gerrymander the poor kids into the power school district...then [government] switch zoning. That's six things. Every time you sue one of these people, they always say it's the other person...or it's the combination of the other five people.
AKH: What can desegregating suburbs do, realistically?
MO: It's hard...A fundamental tenet of all the thing that I believe that [a solution] has to be metropolitan. Reynolds Farley [...University of Michigan] and [Charles] Clotfelter [...Duke University] say this: If you create a world where it's very easy for whites to move move a few blocks away and not be involved, there's almost no way you can keep a place integrated.
Stable integration is almost as much a function of covering a whole area as it si of any numbers...as long as you have an east white enclave to move to, [nowhere] is stable.
This post is taken from an interview that was edited and condensed for length and clarity.
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