Land Use and Housing Policies to Reduce Concentrated Poverty and Racial Segregation

INTRODUCTION As metropolitan areas spread over huge stretches of land, residents living at the core, particularly poor Blacks and Latinos, become increasingly isolated from the jobs and other life opportunities that are rapidly dispersing among increasingly farflung suburbs. The concentration of existing affordable housing in central cities (1) and older suburbs perpetuates the isolation of low-income residents and people of color from life opportunities available to suburban residents. (2) One result is to reinforce the racial segregration which is intimately related to the concentration of poverty at the urban core and in older, inner-ring suburbs. (3) Urban sprawl tends to exacerbate residential racial segregation (4) because unchecked development at the fringe permits rapid abandonment of inner-suburban and central-city housing stocks as White residents move into expanding suburban developments. The resulting isolation of non-Whites in the increasingly segregated areas that Whites abandon effectively denies many of those residents access to the sites of opportunity in distant, developing areas of the region. (5) This isolation is perpetuated not only by the concentration of existing affordable housing in central cities and older suburbs, but by the barriers to developing affordable housing in most outlying suburbs. One of the most invidious barriers is exclusionary zoning. Governmental fragmentation--the proliferation of separate political jurisdictions--facilitates structures such as exclusionary zoning laws. (6) By prohibiting the development of housing that only the better-off can afford, these local policies effectively exclude the poor and people of color from the places that erect those policy fences. Together with fragmented school districts that institutionalize the racial segregation of students, practices such as exclusionary zoning unnecessarily burden both the affected individuals and metropolitan regions. (7) The harmful effects of sprawl and fragmentation on people of color have been well documented. Racial segregation concentrates poverty, with or without class segregation, which Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton have demonstrated with their extensive research. (8) Massey and Denton explain that "racial segregation--and its characteristic institutional form, the Black ghetto--are the key structural factors responsible for the perpetuation of Black poverty in the United States." (9) Together with overt racial discrimination, as where realtors steer Blacks and Whites into segregated neighborhoods, (10) the structural racism that restricts affordable housing to ghettoized areas of the urban core intensifies racial segregation and perpetuates poverty. To address both overt and structural racism requires undoing segregation and making it possible for people to live in places where they can access opportunities for jobs, quality schools, and social networks. Making affordable housing available throughout a metro region, rather than in segregated places distant from opportunity, is a significant means to address segregation and concentrated poverty. In recent years, scholarship about potential reform has been increasingly pessimistic, citing enduring local sovereignty over land use as a barrier to regional cooperation, regional planning, regional housing, and regional tax-based sharing. (11) In response, this article reviews housing and land use policies that several states have enacted to increase the availability of affordable housing in metropolitan regions by countering sprawl and the effects of governmental fragmentation. It illustrates these approaches with case examples of the most promising approaches thus far attempted in the nation's metropolitan regions, and summarizes the empirical and analytic research evaluating the effectiveness of these policies. The success of such policies is measured largely by the extent to which they increase the stock of affordable housing available to nonWhite and poor residents, and by their potential to reduce residential racial segregation. …