It’s hard to find a more segregated housing market in the country than Greater Boston, which is right up there with Birmingham and New Orleans. And if the conservatives on the Supreme Court have their way, it’s likely we will remain as segregated as the capital of Alabama for years to come.
The nation’s highest court recently heard a challenge by the state of Texas to the landmark 1968 Fair Housing Act that banned discrimination in housing. A ruling is expected in the next few months.
The case doesn’t dispute that the law rightfully bans blatant discrimination in housing, from “whites only” real estate listings to landlords who reject tenants based on their skin color. Instead, Texas wants to put the kibosh on a group of pesky housing activists from Dallas who challenged state housing policies, which, while seemingly neutral, had the effect of keeping minority groups out of white neighborhoods. But since it’s not overt discrimination, Texas officials contend it goes beyond the original intent of the law.
We may be a long way from Dallas here, but the case has huge implications for the Bay State, especially the Boston area, where a myriad of subtle – and sometimes not so subtle – regulations and laws have created a housing market divided between white suburbs and urban minority neighborhoods.
A Tale Of Two Cities
When it comes to big metro markets, Greater Boston and the Dallas area certainly seem like polar opposites, a contrast between brainy and reserved and bold and brash. But when it comes to how segregated the housing markets are in the two metro areas, we share more similarities than one might think.
The Boston area has the 12th most segregated housing market in the country, scoring a 67.8 on a “dissimilarity” index put together by a Brown University researcher in 2010, the dissimilarity being how likely it is for whites and minority groups to be living in separate neighborhoods. Anything over 60 is considered highly segregated.
By that measure, the Dallas area actually does a bit better, with a score of 55.1. But by another measure – economic segregation – put together in a study by the Pew Research Center, Dallas ranks near the top nationally, with lower-income residents, many of them minorities, isolated from wealthy and middle-class neighborhoods. There are other similarities as well, especially in the arena of housing policy and regulations.
The Supreme Court case got its start in 2008, when Dallas-based Inclusive Communities, which wants to broaden housing choices for minority groups, sued Texas housing officials. At issue was the way state officials were doling out federal tax credits designed to spur the construction of affordable housing. State officials steered these projects into already low-income, minority neighborhoods, bypassing wealthy white ZIP codes, Inclusive Communities argued.
There were also allegations, brought in a separate case by a pair of Dallas-area developers, that city officials have spent hundreds of millions of federal dollars targeted for desegregating the housing market on downtown condos for wealthy white buyers. These weren’t necessarily blatantly racist moves, but decisions that nevertheless had the result of keeping neighborhoods segregated.
Much the same can be said for long-standing patterns in housing regulation and policies in the Boston area.
When new apartment developments, especially ones with affordable units, are proposed in various suburbs, certainly no one is arguing – at least publicly – that these new apartments should be barred lest they attract lower-income minority families with children to town. (Certainly the heated opposition, and the misplaced anxiety and grumblings that various apartment communities will somehow morph into urban-style public housing projects, are revealing.)
But putting the race question aside, towns and suburbs have erected a complex regulatory bulwark in order to fend off just about any new apartment or condo complex, with the vast majority of Greater Boston communities not allowing for multifamily housing in their zoning.
Moreover, local officials also often pressure developers to limit the number of bedrooms in both new apartments and condos, making three-bedroom units that would be attractive to families somewhat of a rarity.
Sure, our state government is far more progressive than the Texas version. But even so, it has taken years for Massachusetts housing officials to push back against the three-bedroom bans. The net result is far fewer opportunities for people of all income-levels and backgrounds to live in a wide range of communities in Boston’s suburbs.
This web of local building restrictions has “an implicit discriminatory effect on minorities and lower-income households,” the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston notes on its website.
One particularly revealing demographic map of Greater Boston shows a heavy concentration of blue dots, representing the area’s black population, in Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan, surrounded by a sea of red dots everywhere else, representing the region’s white population.
“Restricting multifamily housing disproportionately affects minority households as approximately 48 percent of minority households in Boston have children compared to 32 percent of white households,” the housing center notes. “Furthermore, lower-density, single-family housing is more expensive than higher-density, multifamily housing, which effectively limits the ability of low- and moderate-income households to afford housing in affluent high opportunity suburban communities.”
High Stakes
Despite the similarities between Dallas and Boston when it comes to modern-day housing segregation, there actually is one big difference. In Dallas, local activists and even some local developers have challenged the status quo, taking aim at the state and local housing policies that have effectively kept the local housing market segregated. We have yet to see that kind of overarching challenge in the Boston area.
And if the Supreme Court guts the 1968 Fair Housing Act – narrowly restricting the law to all but the most blatant and outrageous forms of housing discrimination – then we surely never will.
For a region that likes to pride itself as supposedly one of the most progressive in the country, this is shameful.
Email: sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com
