Map 5.2, in the insert, identifies each public housing project in Houston, Texas, with a red star and shows that virtually no public housing is located in the majority-white spaces of the city. Most other major cities in Texas mirror this pattern. In the Lone Star State, housing developments that receive subsidies from the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program overwhelmingly are located in poor nonwhite areas. Not surprisingly, given their concentrations of poor families of color, Texas cities and the state generally rate very low on social mobility for poor children.28 Texas may be more effective at insulating white space from low-income housing because the state enables neighborhood groups to block LIHTC projects it disagrees with.29 But nationally, only about 17 percent of LIHTC projects are built in high-opportunity neighborhoods with high-performing schools, low crime, and easy access to jobs.30
These patterns persist even in cities led by Black mayors. Lee Brown, an African American, served as mayor of Houston for three terms, from 1998 to 2004. Sylvester Turner, elected in 2015 on his third try, is Houston’s second African American mayor. Upon taking the helm, he inherited a segregated city created by a long history of intention. By its own admission, in an analysis submitted to HUD and approved by the mayor and city council in 2015, the city of Houston concentrated more than 71 percent of all government-subsidized housing in only five of its 88 neighborhoods, all of which were very poor and nonwhite.31
In the twentieth century, Houston, like Dallas, Phoenix, and other southwestern cities, followed the national playbook of “slum clearance” and intentionally segregated public housing to confine Negroes and Mexican Americans.32 The Houston Housing Authority (HHA), under pressure from HUD during the Obama years, finally attempted to desegregate its public housing when it proposed its first ever project in a predominantly white, high-opportunity area. The proposed Fountain View housing complex was going to be mixed-income and architecturally consistent with surrounding housing in a west Houston neighborhood near the tony Galleria shopping mall. An architect’s rendering presented an attractive complex that looked like other market-rate housing in the area. At a public hearing on the project, an HHA official presented the agency’s sorry history of intentional segregation and cited recent research documenting the much-improved social mobility for poor children of living in middle-class settings. But the very white crowd was unmoved, as were elected officials.33
The US congressman, city councilman, and school board member who represented the 87-percent white census tract where Fountain View was to be located all spoke against it. “The research—that’s not the issue,” said the then US congressman, John Culberson, in response to the HHA’s presentation. He pledged to sponsor a bill in Congress to make federal housing policy “race neutral.” Despite a documented history of decades of racial discrimination by state actors, he wanted to wrest from government the ability to consider race in locating publicly subsidized housing, although targeting areas made whiter through discrimination was necessary to remedy that discrimination.34
Mayor Turner, born in 1954, the year Brown v. Board of Education was decided, grew up in a large unincorporated Black community that was later annexed by Houston. He prevented the Fountain View project from going forward by refusing to bring it to the city council for a vote to approve needed LIHTC subsidies, citing “costs and other concerns” for the proposed $53 million development. A month later, HUD opened a civil rights investigation.
In its report, HUD concluded that “the city maintains a system for approving LIHTC projects that [are] dependent on whether there is opposition from the residents of the neighborhood” and does so “against a well-documented backdrop of racially motivated opposition to affordable housing and a history of segregation.” According to Obama’s HUD, Mayor Turner’s professed concern about cost was mere pretext because the federal LIHTC funds did not come from city coffers. HUD concluded that the mayor had caved to “racially motivated local opposition.” The report catalogued a litany of coded racial statements made by residents and officials opposing the project, including “bringing them here will bring down this area” and “people come in here and they steal the tires off our Suburbans.”35
But the opposition won. The project was scuttled. It was part of a pattern at the time of neighborhood opposition often successfully blocking proposed affordable housing. As in Plessy v. Ferguson, as with Jim Crow, all that mattered was what those with the power to exclude wanted, despite a constitutional mandate of equality and civil rights laws that Mayor Turner’s generation of Black youth agitated for. Mayor Turner reached an agreement with Trump’s HUD in 2018 to end the civil rights investigation. Turner and the city acknowledged the need for affordable housing everywhere and committed to “a site selection policy prioritizing high opportunity areas.”36
Houston is not an outlier, merely an example of how and why states reify affluent white space. Even in Washington, DC, which has an ostensibly mandatory inclusionary zoning ordinance, virtually all of the inclusionary units that are built under the law are located east of Rock Creek Park. Affluent, very white Ward Three to the west has received less than 1 percent of the affordable units recently built under the law. Extremely low-income families, those making less than $30,000, are not benefiting from the program at all.37 Some low-income housing advocates may defend this result, arguing that more affordable housing can be built in less expensive areas and that Black neighborhood activists want preservation and investment in affordable housing stock where they live.38 Advocates of fair housing, myself included, argue that government should not encourage or institutionalize residential stratification.39 Bastions of exclusion, once created, encourage people who benefit from them to justify and protect what they have and reap more than their fair share of public resources.
Another example of boundary maintenance in the District are two public elementary schools within one mile of each other near Capitol Hill. One, Brent Elementary, is 61 percent white and 9 percent economically disadvantaged (the school district’s term for poor). Payne Elementary is 70 percent Black and 100 percent economically disadvantaged.40 Imagine the resistance that would ensue if the DC schools chancellor attempted to redraw attendance zones to better integrate both schools or to ensure that Payne is not overwhelmed by poverty. A school superintendent in Minnesota lost her job when she tried to move boundary lines to keep a school from becoming racially isolated.41 Imagine also the resistance that would ensue if, instead, the DC schools chancellor decided to reassign the most experienced teachers in the school system to the most impoverished schools, or to dramatically reduce the student-to-teacher ratios only for the poorest schools—among the few evidence-based reforms that improve achievement in very high-poverty schools.42 Neither reforms are likely to happen because of the entrenched expectations and influence of those advantaged by boundaries.
Divides borne of decades of anti-Black policies—restrictive covenants, redlining, urban renewal, segregated public housing, community-destroying interstate highways—persist like ancient ruins. A Black part of town is separated from an idealized white area, a pattern that occurs in communities small and large.43 Railroad tracks, highways, rivers—barriers made by God and man—persist as walls of exclusion. Interstate 49 in Shreveport, Louisiana, runs north to south, still dividing the Black west side from the white east. In Kansas City, Missouri, north-south running Troost Avenue became the “Troost Wall,” only in this city, where young Charlie Parker immersed himself in jazz and nightlife, Blacks are confined to the east. Main Street in Buffalo, New York, and Highway 41 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, produce similarly stark Blacks-to-the-east and whites-to-the-west patterns.44
The most well-known divides traverse cities for miles. Infamously, Delmar Boulevard runs from east to west across St. Louis, Missouri. North of Delmar lies an overwhelmingly Black neighborhood pockmarked by boarded-up, vacant houses. Fewer than 10 percent of the residents have college degrees. Retail is scarce, though there are liquor stores and small family-owned markets.
South of Delmar, mansions stand and impress. This neighborhood is very white, and about 70 percent of residents have graduated from college. They enjoy a density of retail and dining options. A white mother interviewed by the BBC for a short documentary about the contrast worried about the worldview her child will develop as they traversed “the Gucci grocery store” and the “ghetto grocery store.”45 Similarly, 8 Mile Road on the north boundary of Detroit divides predominantly white space from lower-income Black space. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, city and suburban neighborhoods were changing in both the Detroit and St. Louis metro regions. White professionals were moving into the urban core, and middle- and upper-income Blacks were moving to the suburbs in both regions. It remains to be seen how patterns will settle, but pronounced divides remain.
Often a divide spans mere blocks. A neighborhood north of the Georgetown Law campus in Washington, DC, where I teach, was rebirthed as NOMA, for North of Massachusetts Avenue. Varying classes and races confront each other along Florida and New York Avenues. One census tract is 65 percent white, with a median income of $109,000. It is adjacent to a tract that is 63 percent Black, with a $17,303 median, meaning half of the folks here make less than this meager wage.46 A formerly notorious housing project in the vicinity, Sursum Corda, has been torn down, slated to be replaced with a mixed-income development. Luxury condominium buildings are being constructed nearby. If promises are kept, and the city’s inclusionary zoning ordinance is enforced, original residents of Sursum Corda will return to live among higher-income people and serve as an example to the rest of the city of residential inclusion.47
On a day I walked through NOMA in 2019, a Black-owned barber shop, Popular Cuts, held on, a sign in its front window still urging people to vote for Obama. Around the corner, along K Street, were design-chic places that cater to people making six figures—a fancy nail salon, coffee shop, juice bar, and bike store. This is Census Tract 47.01. It was about one-fifth white, 70 percent Black, and clearly transitioning. It is divided by I-395; the Black and poor side to the east feels very different than the white and upper-income blocks to the west.
On the Black side are sturdy but weathered townhouses, most not yet touched by the remodeling wave sweeping the city. Red or brown brick has not yet been painted a soothing shade of gray. House numbers are marked in old English fonts, not art deco. Ordinary black and brown front doors have not yet been replaced with modern, primary-colored ones. Serviceable vertical black iron railings frame front entries instead of horizontal stainless ones that scream remodeled-cool. In this un-redeveloped corner of NOMA, I see plain, struggling Blackness, interrupted by the occasional vacant, boarded property.
My Black American eyes see beauty and dignity in these residents’ struggle. There are few businesses here and very few public trash cans. The occasional ones I see are overflowing. Less than a mile away, on the gentrifying majority-white west side of the same census tract, there is a well-tended public trash can nearly every twenty feet. No dog walker there will have to carry poop for long. How is it that such a stark disparity in trash collection—a public service—exists within the same census tract? Derek Hyra, another urban sociologist, conducted a case study in the Shaw/U Street neighborhood of Washington, DC, and concluded that the gentrification caused not only cultural displacement but also decreased political power among long-term residents.48 Segregation and boundary maintenance contribute to separate and unequal distribution of resources.
OPPORTUNITY HOARDING
What happens in a society in which income and wealth are increasingly concentrated in certain neighborhoods? Douglas Massey reasons that where social boundaries conform to geographic ones, the processes of social stratification that come naturally to human beings become much more efficient and effective: “If out-group members are spatially segregated from in-group members, then the latter are put in good position to use their social power to create institutions and practices that channel resources away from the places where out-group members live.” The same power, he writes, can be used to “direct resources systemically toward in-group areas.” Massey, invoking Charles Tilley’s phraseology, calls this opportunity hoarding and argues that segregation exacerbates it.49
Segregation puts affluent, high-opportunity places in direct competition with lower-opportunity communities for finite public and private resources. Affluent neighborhoods often receive more than their fair share of resources at the expense of, and often subsidized by, everyone else. Those who advocate to bring resources to already-advantaged places contribute to disinvestment and decline elsewhere though they are not likely to perceive or acknowledge this connection.50
Non-rich Americans of all colors and political persuasions should care about the segregation of affluence, not only because opportunity hoarding and unequal public and private investment results but because it limits possibilities for their own social mobility. Those excluded from the best schools, amenities, and networks that lead to great jobs and selective higher education are more likely to be stuck in the socioeconomic class they were born into or to fall lower on the income scale. Rising geographic separation of the affluent appears to contribute to rising inequality.51 They rose together in the late twentieth century. As those with the power to set wages for others became ever more residentially isolated from people who need their paychecks, CEO-to-worker pay increased 875 percent between 1978 and 2012, and by 2017, CEOs were paid 361 times more than the average worker.52
Segregation of affluence strikes at the heart of American shibboleths. Rather than facilitating robust upward mobility, it protects the wealthiest from competition from everyone else.53 In 2010, only 42 percent of all Americans lived in a middle-class neighborhood, down from 65 percent in 1970.54 This is due to the rising segregation of affluence and of poverty. With economic sorting, there are fewer middle-class neighborhoods, and those that persist are at risk of declining and becoming poorer as affluent people, and their tax base, concentrate elsewhere.
An example: Once-aspirational residential suburbs of Philadelphia struggle to pay for schools and to replace old water and sewer lines that violate environmental mandates. Low-income voucher holders moved to struggling suburbs as poor people were priced out of Philadelphia. As poor people moved in, middle-class and wealthy people fled, a pattern of suburbanization of poverty that occurred in many metropolitan areas. As one town councilman in struggling Norristown, Pennsylvania, said of its predicament, in the National Catholic Reporter, “We’ve lost that sense as Americans that we can all still live together and that’s part of what’s made the inequality in this country so crass and gross. People don’t want to be around each other anymore.”55
The risk for a nation in which elites increasingly live apart from everyone else is that the resources and tax base to pay for programs and institutions that ordinary people need will continue to erode. Worse, those who live in concentrated poverty are likely to be trapped there. In an America that segregates wealth and opportunity from the poor, neither city, suburb, nor rural hamlet will be an engine of upward mobility for poor folk.56
Those who live in affluent areas may resist this analysis, offended that it somehow denies their hard work. Individuals toil mightily to get into or stay in the winner column. My argument is that (1) it is much easier to win while riding the “up” escalator; and (2) the policies and habits that facilitate a ride up for a relative few also force many others to take the “down” escalator.57 I have presented my theory of the distributional effects of concentrated affluence. Here is more evidence from specific contexts to support it.
SERVICES, PUBLIC GOODS, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND DEVELOPMENT
Paul Jargowsky correctly asserts that the expansion of high-poverty hoods—and impliedly, its opposite, the concentration of affluence—is the result of intentional public policy choices. He argues that our nation’s investment in affluent, exclusionary suburbs and exurbs, beginning in the 1970s, was excessive and far beyond what was needed to meet metropolitan population growth.
As older, underutilized communities languished or declined in that era, regions paid for new infrastructure in exclusionary new suburbs.58 The federal government rained down more than half a trillion dollars on states to subsidize the cost of roads leading out to an ever-expanding suburban frontier. Much as the federal government pursued foundational policies that assisted locals in constructing and maintaining poor Black space, highways and redlined FHA mortgage insurance were foundational federal investments in suburbanizing white space.59 Academics, myself included, have bemoaned the tyranny of suburban-favored quarters that are subsidized by the people they exclude. People of all colors and classes who live elsewhere helped pay for the roads, sewers, and other golden infrastructure that made these low-poverty, resource-rich places possible.60
This pattern of overinvestment in exclusionary predominantly white space and disinvestment or neglect elsewhere is replicated within cities across the country. Jessica Trounstine, in her important book Segregation by Design, argues that segregation, developed and maintained over a century, institutionalized the preferences of white property owners, protecting their property values and giving exclusive access to high-quality public amenities. She amassed empirical evidence to support her theory that segregation creates a city politics that reproduces inequality—a racial and economic hierarchy of favored and disfavored residents. After local governments deployed land use, slum clearance, and other policies to tightly compact Black Americans, they denied them adequate sewers, roads, garbage collection, and/or public health services. Trounstine argues that this nefarious role of segregation in city politics continues to this day. She asserts that wealthy whites still try to segregate themselves, and local governments still acquiesce in their desires, invest more in their neighborhoods, and disinvest elsewhere.61
For example, Trounstine examined detailed ward-level data from Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and found that sewer extensions were much less likely to be built in neighborhoods with large numbers of Black renters, and this inequality persists. She analyzed all American cities and found that more segregated cities had more racial inequality in water and sewer access. Meanwhile, unequal service provisions informed white folks’ judgments about poor and minority people. Disinvestment in Black neighborhoods contributed to conscious and unconscious biases about the effect of nonwhites on property values and quality of public goods. Segregation begat disinvestment. Disinvestment begat whites’ biased attitudes, which in turn contributed to segregation. Trounstine also found that segregated cities, often gripped by race and class divisions, tend to spend less on public goods like roads, policing, parks, and sewers.62 Underinvestment facilitated by segregation and political division harms all residents in a segregated city. Sewers overflow more frequently in segregated places.63
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