Making the Invisible Visible: Confronting Housing Problems in Minnesota Through a Racial and Structu

1
Making the Invisible VisibleConfronting Housing
Problems in Minnesota Through a Racial and
Structural Lens

• Changing the Face of Housing in Minnesota 4th
  Annual Event
• December 9th 2005
• john a. powell
• Williams Chair in Civil Rights Civil Liberties,
  Moritz College of Law
• Executive Director, Kirwan Institute for the
  Study of Race and Ethnicity
• The Ohio State University
• http//www.kirwaninstitute.org/

2
Introduction and Overview

• Why should we view housing needs through a racial
  lens?
• Housing through a structural lens
• Making the invisible, visible
• Race, structures and housing issues in the Twin
  Cities
• How can we move forward?

3
Race and Housing

• Viewing Housing Need Through a Racial Lens

4
Housing Need Through a Racial Lens

• It is critical to look at housing need and
  housing assistance through a racial lens
• Why?
• The tremendous disparities in housing need for
  people of color
• The well documented web of housing challenges
  that disproportionately impact people of color
• A housing market that does not produce units that
  are affordable to most people of color
• Racial discrimination and steering
• Policies that concentrate affordable housing in
  low opportunity areas
• Discriminatory and predatory lending practices

5
Web of Housing Challenges for Communities of Color
Housing Challenges
6
Racial Disparities in Housing Need in Minnesota
(2000)

• Communities of color are more than twice as
  likely to be struggling with housing problems
  that Whites in Minnesota
• Almost all of these housing problems are
  associated with cost

7
Racial Disparities in Housing Need in Hennepin
County (2000)

• These same trends are found in Hennepin County
• Once again, almost all of these housing problems
  are associated with cost

8
Racial Disparity in Minneapolis

• Racial disparities are extremely high across
  multiple indicators in the Minneapolis region
• The Kirwan Institute recently measured the
  severity of racial disparity in over 150
  metropolitan areas
• Our analysis found Minneapolis to have one of the
  highest degrees of racial disparity when compared
  to peer regions
• However some data suggest that this gap has
  closed some during the 1990s

9
Racial Disparity in Minneapolis
Kirwan recently completed an assessment of
African American/White racial disparity across
more than two dozen neighborhood, employment,
education, mobility, wealth and child health
indicators in more than 150 metro areas. The
Minneapolis region had the 6th highest level of
Black/White disparity out of the 21 largest
metropolitan areas in the Great Lakes region
(rust belt states).
10
Who Does the Housing Market Serve?

• Between white households and households of color,
  due to the income and asset differences, housing
  prices have a disproportionate impact on people
  of color
• The housing market primarily serves middle and
  upper income households, excluding low income
  people of color (and low income Whites)

11
Who Does the Housing Market Serve?

• While African American and Latino city residents
  are most often burdened, these groups are not the
  only ones to be negatively impacted by our
  housing market
• Whites living in the city and inner suburbs are
  harmed as well
• High concentrations of poverty and segregated
  neighborhoods can also have deleterious effects
  on the well-being and health of the entire
  metropolitan region

12
Who Does the Housing Market Serve?

• Who is served by the housing market?
• In the 3rd quarter of 2005, Wells Fargo found
  that only 63 of families could afford the cost
  of the median home sold in the Minneapolis-St.
  Paul region
• A households needs to earn at least 37,000 a
  year to afford a market rate 2 bedroom apartment
  in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region in 2005
• A minimum wage worker would have to work 114
  hours a week to afford a market rate 2 bedroom
  apartment in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region in
  2004

13
The Web of Opportunity

• Opportunities in our society are geographically
  distributed and often clustered throughout
  metropolitan areas
• This creates winner and loser communities or
  high and low opportunity communities
• Opportunities exist in a complex web and are
  often reinforcing, magnifying conditions in low
  and high opportunity areas

14
Housing and Opportunity

• Housing is Critical in Determining Access to
  Opportunity

15
Affordable Housing in LowOpportunity Areas

• Both subsidized housing and affordable housing is
  often geographically concentrated in inner city
  communities of color
• The impact of concentrated subsidized/affordable
  housing
• This concentration results in racial segregation
• Research suggests that this concentration further
  depresses the life outcomes for low income
  subsidized housing residents (who are primarily
  minority)
• At a neighborhood level, the over concentration
  of subsidized housing destabilizes these
  predominately minority inner city neighborhoods

16
African American Segregation in 2000
17
Hispanic Segregation in 2000
18
Racial Segregation is Opportunity Segregation

• Racial segregation represents a separation from
  opportunity for people of color in the US
• Producing a racial isolation in neighborhoods
  that are lacking the essential opportunities to
  advance in our society
• Fueling racial disparities

19
Segregation is One Manifestation of Spatial
Racism
This segregation impacts a number of
life-opportunities
School Segregation
Impacts on Educational Achievement
Exposure to crime arrest
Transportation limitations and other inequitable
public services
Neighborhood Segregation
Job segregation
Racial stigma
Impacts on community power and assets
Adapted from figure by Barbara Reskin at
http//faculty.washington.edu/reskin/
20
Structural Racism and Housing

• The Hidden Opportunity Killer

21
Intersections of Opportunity and Structural
Racism

• Structural racism is present within each
  opportunity structure and at the intersection of
  each structure.
• It is pervasive, falls along racial lines,
  produces cumulative, durable group-based
  inequalities, and
• often times it is invisible.

22
Making the Invisible Visible Housing Issues
Through a Structural Lens

• Structural racism is the often invisible
  interaction between institutions, policies, and
  practices which inevitably perpetuates barriers
  to opportunities and racial disparities.

• Public and private institutions each build walls
• One wall is joined by another until they
  construct a maze
• The maze walls off whole communities of color
  from opportunities

Structural racism is the hidden opportunity
killer.
Source http//www.centerforsocialinclusion.org/st
ruct_racism.html
23
Examples of SR Spatial Racism

• Spatial racism is a form of structural racism
• What is spatial racism?
• The cumulative impact of policies and structures
  that work to segregate people of color from
  opportunity and strip away resources from inner
  city (and sometimes inner suburban) communities
  of color

24
Examples of Spatial Racism

• Spatial Racism is not natural or neutral it
  results from government policies, such as
• Zoning laws which prevent affordable housing in
  many suburbs
• Housing policies that concentrate subsidized
  housing
• Municipalities that subsidize the relocation of
  businesses out of the city
• Transportation spending which favors highways,
  metropolitan expansion and urban sprawl
• Court decisions that prevent metropolitan school
  desegregation
• School funding which is tied to property taxes

25
Race, Structures and Housing

• Issues in the Twin Cities

26
Race, Structures and Housingin the Twin Cities

• Hot markets and housing affordability in the Twin
  Cities
• What has the Holman experience taught us about
  housing mobility?
• Housing policy is educational policy
• Implications from The Choice is Yours Program

27
Housing Affordability in the Twin Cities

• Housing costs are rising rapidly in the
  Minneapolis region creating hot market
  conditions similar to coastal housing markets
• Wells Fargo found Minneapolis to be the 2nd most
  unaffordable housing market in the Midwest in the
  3rd quarter of 2005
• These trends threaten those most vulnerable in
  the housing market
• Low income households (who are primarily
  households of color)

28
Income is not growing as fast as housing prices
in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region
29
Housing Affordability for Renters

• The rental market in Minneapolis is rapidly
  increasing in cost, while wages have not
  increased
• More Low Income households will become cost
  burdened due to these trends

Median monthly renter income (in red) and Fair
Market Rents (in yellow) 2000 to 2004.
30
Housing Affordability in the Twin Cities

• Research commissioned by the Minnesota housing
  agency predicts affordability problems will
  become worse in the Twin Cities region
• By 2010 an additional 36,000 low income
  households will not have their housing needs met
  by the private housing market (in 2000 171,000
  low income households were cost burdened and
  couldnt find affordable units)

31
Learning from Holman

• The Holman Consent Decree produced the most
  significant housing mobility initiative in the
  Minneapolis region
• The goal of Holman was to remedy the racial and
  economic segregation of subsidized units in the
  region
• The results of Holman have been mixed- initial
  problems created distrust and difficulties for
  early participants
• More recent housing production in suburban
  communities has helped dissipate these feelings
  and connect some people to higher opportunity
  areas

32
What Can we Learn From Holman?

• Implementation matters- the principles of Holman
  may have been sound but the implementation was
  flawed
• Units were destroyed before being rebuilt
• Units were not necessarily located in high
  opportunity communities
• Examples problems accessing transit, employment
• Differences in housing need among racial groups
  were not recognized (Hmong population)
• These factors helped exacerbate housing need in
  the initial implementation, creating tension and
  mistrust
• Similar implementation problems were associated
  with other initiatives (Hope VI, MTO)

33
Did Holman Connect People to Opportunity?

• Research suggests that initial dislocations
  associated with Holman resulted in movements to
  less impacted areas that may not have been areas
  of opportunity
• Generally poverty rates were lower in new
  neighborhoods but not as low as the regional
  average
• Complaints about access to jobs/transit
• Opportunity is a multi-faceted concept
• Need to look at more than just poverty, focus on
  transit, jobs, schools, neighborhood conditions

Source Edward Goetz, Desegregation Lawsuits and
Public Housing Dispersal, Journal of the American
Planning Association
34
Linking Housing Policyto Educational Policy

• Education and housing policy are intertwined in
  metropolitan areas
• Place determines access to education
• Efforts to address segregation in the Minneapolis
  school district (resulting in the Choice is Yours
  program) are initiatives to address this impact
  of housing segregation
• Housing policy must be adapted to help these
  efforts to address school segregation and not
  provide another obstacle to addressing racial and
  economic school segregation

35
Implications from Choice is Yours

• Mobility matters (Minneapolis kids in schools
  with low levels of poverty are performing well)
• Children are performing well in new school
  districts
• Although the program is successful it produces a
  tension
• What happens to the 43,000 students left behind?
  
• Even if enrollment declines costs are fixed for
  most large urban public schools (will they
  exacerbate problems, leave more higher poverty
  schools in the city)
• Similar problems result from Charter schools

36
Linking Housing Policyto Educational Policy

• What is a strategy to link housing policy with
  educational policy?
• Utilizing Low Income Housing Tax Credit
  developments (and targeting other affordable
  housing programs) to address school segregation
• Research by Myron Orfield at the Institute on
  Race and Poverty suggests that targeted
  subsidized housing production significantly
  reduces the regions school segregation
• Why is LIHTC important?
• It is the biggest source of new affordable
  housing production in the nation

37
School Segregation and LIHTC Placement
38
LIHTC and Segregated Schools

• Currently, LIHTC development is conflicting with
  efforts to desegregate schools
• Nearly ¾s of African American and Hispanic LIHTC
  residents are located in segregated schools

39
Moving Forward

• How can we make progress in meeting housing need
  and reducing housing disparities?

40
How Can we Move Forward?

• Adapting strategies to conditions in a hot
  market region
• Assuring that housing is always connected to
  opportunity
• Remain persistent assure that policies to
  produce change are sufficient and sustainable

41
Adapting Housing Strategies in Hot Market
Cities

• The Minneapolis-St. Paul region can be
  categorized as a hot market city
• Especially when compared to other regions in the
  Midwest
• Characteristics
• Strong housing and job market
• Likely to experience a rapid inflation of
  property values
• Influx of new residents and high rate of
  investment
• In hot market cities preserving and expanding
  affordable housing is a pressing concern

42
Adapting Housing Strategies in Hot Market
Cities

• Housing is primary policy concern
• Must assure affordable housing is included in mix
  of new investments
• Strengthen inclusionary zoning practices
• Work to maintain and preserve affordable units
• Focus on connecting affordable housing in the
  region to areas of opportunity (both within the
  city and in the suburbs)
• Still must work to address extreme concentrations
  of subsidized housing in low opportunity areas,
  but emphasis on preservation and expansion of the
  affordable units is also important
• Understand the limitations to housing vouchers in
  hot market cities, plan for additional support to
  make housing vouchers go further
• Utilize LIHTC to produce units in high
  opportunity (non-impacted) areas

43
Assuring that Housing is Connected to Opportunity

• How can we remedy the disparities in access to
  opportunity in our metropolitan areas?
• Assure access to communities of opportunity for
  all people, especially people of color and low
  income families/households
• Provide affordable housing opportunities in high
  opportunity communities
• Bring opportunity to low opportunity communities
• Build opportunities in low opportunity areas

44
Remain Persistent

• The Minneapolis-St. Paul region has several
  policies that can act as structural interventions
  to reduce housing disparity
• Inclusionary zoning
• The Choice is Yours school mobility program
• These are important policies but must be
  continually strengthened and expanded to be
  sustainable

45
Remain Persistent

• Inclusionary zoning
• Inclusionary zoning and other inclusionary
  measures are in place to produce affordable
  housing units in the region
• These efforts should be applauded
• But, inclusionary zoning in the Minneapolis
  region must be expanded/strengthened and
  inclusionary zoning must be better connected to
  high opportunity areas

46
Remain Persistent

• The Choice is Yours school mobility program
• The Choice is Yours public school choice
  program for low income families in Minneapolis is
  now at 100 capacity and provides access to
  suburban school districts for participating
  children
• But, the enrollment is limited and this is only a
  short term solution to a larger problem
• Need for housing policies to support the goals of
  desegregation
• Need for a region-wide strategy that is
  sustainable
• What happens to those children who are left
  behind?

47
Concluding Thoughts

• Housing efforts MUST meet two goals
  simultaneously to reduce racial disparities
• Expand the amount of affordable housing
• Consciously connect affordable housing to areas
  of opportunity
• Meeting housing need is more than just providing
  shelter
• Where you live impacts your life more than what
  you live in

48
Concluding Thoughts

• We need integration with opportunity to have a
  truly just society
• A society where all people would have access to
  the means essential to living a life they have
  reason to value
• A society where a demographic identifier would
  not predict an individuals life chances
• Linked fate

49
Questions or Comments? For More Information
Visit Us On-Linewww.KirwanInstitute.org