The Dream Revisited

Contemporary Debates About Housing, Segregation, and Opportunity

Justin Steil, Ingrid Ellen

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231545044
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A half century after the Fair Housing Act, despite ongoing transformations of the geography of privilege and poverty, residential segregation by race and income continues to shape urban and suburban neighborhoods in the United States. Why do people live where they do? What explains segregation's persistence? And why is addressing segregation so complicated?

The Dream Revisited brings together a range of expert viewpoints on the causes and consequences of the nation's separate and unequal living patterns. Leading scholars and practitioners, including civil rights advocates, affordable housing developers, elected officials, and fair housing lawyers, discuss the nature of and policy responses to residential segregation. Essays scrutinize the factors that sustain segregation, including persistent barriers to mobility and complex neighborhood preferences, and its consequences from health to home finance and from policing to politics. They debate how actively and in what ways the government should intervene in housing markets to foster integration. The book features timely analyses of issues such as school integration, mixed income housing, and responses to gentrification from a diversity of viewpoints. A probing examination of a deeply rooted problem, The Dream Revisited offers pressing insights into the changing face of urban inequality.

PART I

THE MEANING OF SEGREGATION

Introduction

The five discussions that follow lead us to ask what the shorthand term “segregation” means in different contexts, and why segregation continues to matter in the United States and internationally. Segregation in the United States generally refers to the separation of racial or ethnic groups in places of residence or in schools. This implicit focus on race to the exclusion of class is somewhat surprising given significant levels of residential and educational segregation by income, extensive municipal fragmentation by class, and tax structures that contribute to dramatic neighborhood-based inequalities in access to public goods. Indeed, increasing residential segregation by income in the United States is creating a growing spatial concentration of both the poor and the affluent, as well as declines in the share of households living in mixed-income neighborhoods. Perhaps the lack of popular focus on income segregation should not come as a surprise given the idea that opportunity in the United States is, or at least should be, available to all, regardless of where they start on the economic ladder. But the widening of economic inequality in recent decades has driven an increase in income segregation that appears to be making socioeconomic mobility ever more elusive.¹

A focus on segregation is frequently understood to imply that the appropriate solution is integration. But the concept of integration itself is complicated. James Baldwin, in The Fire Next Time (1963), famously asked, “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”² And Harry Belafonte (2011) describes Martin Luther King, Jr. expressing concerns shortly before his assassination about integrating into a dominant ideology insufficiently concerned about the poor and disenfranchised.³ Several of the authors here debate the extent to which integration should be seen as a solution to the inequalities that segregation generates and what assumptions often accompany a focus on racial integration.

Several tensions run through the discussions, including who is harmed by segregation, whether we should be concerned about the concentration of advantage or only disadvantage, the effectiveness of focusing on race as compared to class, and the degree to which integration should be a goal in and of itself. One source of widespread agreement is the intertwining of residential and educational segregation and the need for policy responses to consider both housing and schools simultaneously.

Who Is Harmed?

Several of the discussions in this section ask the extent to which segregation harms us all or only harms those who are already disadvantaged. There is widespread agreement that those who are already disadvantaged are further harmed by segregation, as Richard Rothstein, Richard Kahlenberg, Roger Andersson, and others review. But the effects of segregation on society more broadly is debated. Reaching back to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Sherrilyn Ifill notes that the Supreme Court even then ignored the argument made by Kenneth Clark that “school segregation twisted the personality development of white as well as Negro children.” Ifill and James Ryan argue that a focus on integration is important in part because segregation harms society more broadly and because greater diversity in schools and neighborhoods can improve the school performance, psychological well-being, and civic engagement of all students.

Where Should the Focus Be?

Related to this question, the discussions ask whether we should be concerned only about the concentration of disadvantage or also the concentration of advantage. Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff argue that we should care about the concentration of affluence, in addition to the concentration of poverty, because of the effects that concentrated affluence can have on our democracy and our social institutions. Patrick Sharkey implies that the residential isolation of whites is problematic because it allows whites to hoard opportunities for themselves and undermines equality of opportunity. Michael Lens, by contrast, argues that given limited resources, until there is more direct evidence of the negative effects of affluent segregation, solutions for concentrated poverty should be prioritized.

How Do Approaches Based on Race and Class Compare?

Nationwide, average levels of residential segregation by race have been decreasing slowly over the past four decades, while segregation by income has been increasing. Several contributors discuss the effectiveness and wisdom of socioeconomically targeted strategies for addressing racial segregation and associated inequality. For instance, Andersson points out that policies encouraging a mix of low- and middle-income households have been found to have positive neighborhood and individual effects in Sweden, whereas those focusing on avoiding ethnic clustering have had less impact. Rothstein chronicles the long history of public policies in the United States creating and perpetuating disadvantage for nonwhite groups and then argues that substituting class for race in attempting to address that inequality will not work because race and poverty, though correlated, are different both in degree and in spatial distribution. Glenn Harris explains how building a racial-equity frame for policy evaluation will actually reduce economic inequality as well as racial inequality. Alan Berube points out that reductions in racial segregation are not always accompanied by reductions in economic segregation and that, while levels of residential segregation by race in suburban areas have declined over the past several decades, the concentration of poverty in suburbs has risen.

Is Integration the Goal?

The initial discussion debates the extent to which integration should be a goal in itself or whether integration is better considered one strategy for achieving racial or economic equity, and the remaining discussions in this section pick up on this theme as well. Mary Pattillo argues that a focus on integration “stigmatizes Black people and Black space and valorizes Whiteness.” Andersson, however, points out that even programs designed to invest in particular neighborhoods without promoting integration can similarly “further stigmatize the targeted area” and often “turn out either to displace problems somewhere else or to be simply ineffective.” What, then, to do? Ifill contends that racial integration has value as a goal in itself and promises benefits for all that do not rest on stigmatizing blackness—namely, the promise of a truly equal, inclusive, multiracial society characterized by greater cross-racial understanding and civic engagement, as well as a more equitable allocation of public services. Rothstein argues that racial integration is essentially a constitutional imperative, to redress centuries of public policy enforcing an apartheid state. Others, such as Sharkey, argue that regardless of the value placed on integration as a goal, segregation reproduces inequality and integrative moves are therefore at least one worthwhile path toward greater racial equality. Charles Clotfelter and Kahlenberg similarly posit that socioeconomic integration of schools is important as a step to create enduring benefits for all students. Scott Allard, however, points out that sometimes integration into suburban neighborhoods may actually make crucial supports, such as emergency financial assistance, employment services, and affordable housing programs, harder to access for lower-income households coming from cities where there is a greater density of supportive institutions.

The Discussions in Part I

Why Integration?

Drawing on her own experience of a school-desegregation busing program, Mary Pattillo argues that promoting integration as the solution to improving the lives of individuals who are poor or black further stigmatizes poverty or blackness and valorizes wealth or whiteness as “both the symbol of opportunity and the measuring stick for equality.” The substance of equality, Pattillo writes, requires more than just the “co-location of Black and White bodies” but real, tangible, material equality in things like school performance, air quality, parks, and other goods. Noting that whites are the most segregated of all racial and ethnic groups in the United States, Sherrilyn Ifill replies that integration has two crucial benefits that do not involve stigma: first, white students who learn in integrated classrooms benefit significantly in increased civic engagement and heightened awareness of the treatment of others; and second, integration may be the surest path to an equitable distribution of public investment and public services for all households, regardless of race. Rucker Johnson looks to the narrowing of the black-white achievement gap in the decades after the Brown v. Board of Education decision and argues that well-crafted policies can make a difference, and that we need a variety of simultaneous strategies, such as school desegregation and school finance reform, to advance equal access to educational opportunity. Patrick Sharkey argues that racial integration is an important social goal because residential segregation is a central mechanism in the production of racial inequality and allows whites to hoard resources and opportunities that should be equally accessible to all.

Comparative Perspectives on Segregation

The second discussion in this section brings a comparative perspective, examining similarities and differences between segregation in the United States and Europe. Roger Andersson begins by pointing out that, compared to Europe, in the United States socioeconomic disparities are wider, poverty deeper, intergenerational mobility lower, crime rates higher, and the degree of segregation by both race and class greater, making residential segregation an especially salient issue. He also notes that structures of local government and taxation in the United States exacerbate neighborhood inequality, in contrast to Europe where redistributive taxation policies and social services mitigate the consequences of spatial segregation. Chris McCrudden notes that the scholarship on antidiscrimination laws focusing on race and segregation in the United States have not often taken a comparative perspective, thus cutting off legal re...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The Meaning of Segregation
• Part II: Causes of Contemporary Racial Segregation
• Part III: Consequences of Segregation
• Part IV: Policy Implications
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index