http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/15/o...itical-price-for-affordable-housing.html?_r=1
For generations, working- and middle-class opponents of anti-discrimination laws have argued that more affluent whites support such laws without having to bear any of the costs.
Now, the Democratic loyalty of better-off white liberals will be tested by two recent developments: the June 25 Supreme Court decision in
Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. and the
Department of Housing and Urban Development’s issuance of a new rule on July 8, “
Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.”
The court’s decision, which the Obama administration
sought in an amicus brief, together with the HUD regulation, are major victories for civil rights advocates, who argue that moving poor minorities, especially young children, out of high-poverty neighborhoods can produce improvements in education, earnings and marriage stability.
If these two rulings survive further legal and legislative challenges, they will set in motion much tougher enforcement of the
1968 Fair Housing Act, and will require predominantly white communities to build significantly more low-income housing.
Such a development has potential political ramifications. It may drive some
middle-income and other whites into the arms of the Republican Party.
Westchester County in New York has a
median household income of $81,946; 44.4 percent of adults there are college graduates. The county — which is emblematic of suburban communities that have switched from Republican to Democratic over the past 25 years — presents a worrisome precedent for Democrats.
As long ago as 1992, county residents stopped voting for Republican presidential nominees; since then they
have supported Democratic presidential candidates, without exception. Registered Democratic voters, once the minority, currently outnumber Republicans two to one,
255,804 to 127,074.
Partisan realignment notwithstanding, voters in this solidly Democratic jurisdiction have now twice elected — in 2009 and 2013 – a local Republican, Robert Astorino, to the position of county executive. First, Astorino
decisively defeated the incumbent Democrat, Andrew Spano, just a year after Obama carried the county with 63 percent of the vote. Four years later, in 2013, Astorino beat the Democratic nominee, Noam Bramson.
What sustained Astorino in this Democratic bastion were the lingering effects of a 2009
consent decree, signed by Spano, to provide low-income blacks and Hispanics with 750 units of affordable housing in Westchester. The agreement calls for this housing to be located in the county’s 31 most affluent white communities before the end of 2016.
The 2009 consent agreement is similar to decrees that jurisdictions across the country will be facing as the Supreme Court and HUD rulings are put into action.
Astorino’s strongest margins of victory against Spano were in the
overwhelmingly white towns where the consent decree called for the construction of affordable housing.
Astorino himself, while slowly moving toward the 750-unit target, has repeatedly demonized the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. In his April 2013
State of the County address, he declared:
Astorino warned that “A five-story building — or higher – could be put on your street”; that the agreement to build 750 units “was just a starting point”; and that the actual HUD target is “10,768 housing units” at a cost to the county of $1 billion.
Voters in other towns and counties may not react as Westchester County voters appear to have. At one level, the growing strength of suburban Democrats suggests that these white bastions may be more amenable than they have been in the past to inclusive racial policies.
If, however, Westchester County is an indicator of how similar jurisdictions will respond to stepped-up construction of affordable housing, it could mean trouble for the Democratic Party.
For example, Robert Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard who strongly supports affordable-housing initiatives, noted the possibility of a political backlash:
William Julius Wilson, also a member of the Harvard sociology department, was more optimistic, pointing out that gradual execution of the law’s provisions may be the key to success:
Still, Democratic leaders may find themselves caught between the conflicting demands of minority voters and white mid-to-upper income households.
African-Americans and liberal suburbanites are key Democratic constituencies, and affordable housing touches on matters of core importance to each group.
For low-income African-Americans in particular, the stakes are high.
There is a strong body of evidence that poor minority children under the age of 13 have improved life chances if they move from high-poverty into lower-poverty neighborhoods. Research supporting this view has been conducted by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence F. Katz, all economists at Harvard, in their May 2015 report, “
The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children.” Chetty et al. report, for example, that
and
While conservatives have long railed against federal enforcement of fair housing legislation, some liberal analysts cite problems they attribute to the difficulty of racial and ethnic integration.
Perhaps most famously,
Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, reported in his 2007 essay “
E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” that in the short run:
Diverse communities, Putnam wrote, “tend to be larger, more mobile, less egalitarian, more crime-ridden.”
A 2009 study conducted for the federal Department of Health and Human Services by the liberal Urban Institute, “
Vulnerable Youth and the Transition to Adulthood,” serves to further document the perceived hazards of having low-income neighbors.
The study compared “risk behaviors” among low-, middle- and high-income adolescents. The percentage of those who attack others or get into fights was 33 percent for low-income youth, 26 percent for middle income and 22 percent for high income. The same pattern was found for gang membership: 12 percent, 7 percent, and 5 percent; for stealing something worth more than $50, 18 percent, 13 percent, 11 percent; for carrying a gun, 19, 16, and 11 percent; and for births before the age of 18: 7 percent, 2 percent, and 1 percent.
The issue of enforced integration via federal housing policy poses additional problems for racial and ethnic minorities, who currently make up
30 percent of the population — and made up 23 percent of voters in the last presidential election. Black and Hispanic turnout on Election Day can be decisive, and the response to Democratic housing initiatives is of substantial concern to party strategists.
Elijah Anderson, a sociologist at Yale, describes the situation from a black vantage point in his essay “
The White Space”:
Anderson notes that stereotyping, prejudice and fear are damaging to African-Americans. He continued in a phone interview:
The complexities of affordable housing raise a further political question: Can Republicans turn the Supreme Court and HUD decisions and the renewed drive to integrate residential housing into a wedge issue to weaken Democratic allegiance?
Republicans have already begun to pull out the stops.
On June 9, in anticipation of the HUD regulation, Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, won
House approval of an amendment barring the use of tax dollars to enforce the HUD rule. It passed 229 to 193. Republicans voted in favor 229 to 11; Democrats were unanimously opposed, 182-0.
Simultaneously, the conservative media have been
drumming up opposition to the HUD regulation.
A June 11
FoxBusiness story carried the headline “Affordable Housing Coming to a Neighborhood Near You?”
Stanley Kurtz, at National Review,
exploded on July 8, the day the HUD regulation was announced:
“Over time,” Kurtz continued,
Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing
It happens that Bill and
Hillary Clinton live and vote in Westchester County, and their own precinct in Chappaqua —
362 registered Democrats to 213 Republicans — reflects the shift in local elections to the Republican Party. In 2012,
Obama won the precinct 342 to 250. In 2009, Astorino carried the Clintons’ precinct
131 to 89, and
in 2013, 197 to 160.
The Supreme Court and HUD have together set in motion a major test of middle- and upper-middle-class white America, which will determine whether support for racial equality goes beyond calls to lower the Confederate flag, beyond demands for stricter oversight of the police in minority neighborhoods, and on to a willingness to tolerate racial change in the house next door.
