Uncooperative Housing

This year is the fortieth anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. As we celebrate Barack Obama's election and the extraordinary social transformations that the civil rights movement brought us, we should also review with fresh eyes some of the divisions that remain. One of the thorniest of these is housing segregation. There is no doubt that many suburbs are less monolithically white than they used to be, and that many neighborhoods in the Deep South have integrated at faster rates than in the urban North. Overall, however, national disparities in public schools, medical care and policing all flow from the fact that residential segregation by race remains a pervasive feature of American life--and that it exists in the United States at a higher rate than in just about any other industrialized country. This, in turn, allows for--and even rationalizes--separate and very unequal public policies exacerbating the social barriers between white citizens and those in communities of color.

Geographic isolation enables a vicious circle of human devaluation: public transportation is less reliable and sometimes nonexistent in many neighborhoods marked as black; this makes it harder to be punctual in the workplace. More schools are built next to or on top of industrial waste sites in communities of color, contributing to more public health crises like asthma and lead poisoning. And banking practices are often wildly different: it is much harder to obtain a prime (rather than a subprime) mortgage in a black neighborhood than in a white one with similar income levels.

Take New York City--at once the most cosmopolitan and mixed up of metropolises. When I voted on November 4, I saw an exhilarating civic festival, with lines of good people wrapped around the block. But I spotted only one other black person in the entire crowd. Despite its generally left-leaning politics, Manhattan is one of the most residentially segregated places in the country--not just neighborhood by neighborhood but block by block and building by building. Take co-ops: unlike condominiums, rentals or straight sales (which have only a right of first refusal), co-ops can turn applicants down without ever disclosing a reason and are by their structure immune to fair-housing testers. For years, organizations like the Anti-Discrimination Center in New York have been trying to get the City Council to hold hearings on a bill that would require such disclosure. Although almost two-thirds of cooperative apartment owners support it, the bill languished until just months ago, when the City Council advanced a new version requiring zero disclosure and shifting rule-making authority from the City Council alone to a process of "consultation with...the cooperative apartment industry."

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