Integrated effort to fight housing, school barriers?
Delivering on the fair housing mandate will likely mean reorienting some federal programs, such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. (A HUD spokeswoman said the agency is “acutely aware of the impact of LIHTC decision-making policies, including siting of properties, on affirmatively furthering fair housing,” but that further comment would be “premature.”) It will also, in some instances, require changing the way decisions get made at the local level. In one high-profile case involving New York’s Westchester County, which was found to be shirking its fair housing obligations, HUD intervened in 2009 to broker a settlement. (Remapping Debate is a project of the Anti-Discrimination Center, the non-profit organization that brought the case against the county.)
But in the interview, Trasviña, like Zimmerman, cast his office largely in the role of educator and facilitator, not enforcer or implementor. “It’s a matter of empowering local communities through HUD dollars to really reshape themselves,” he said. And, “the best thing we can do is help the local voices come forward and be heard as part of the process.” And, most forcefully, “we’re committed to providing data to local jurisdictions, and they need to be committed to sharing in this process.” (Asked about the prospects for more immediate approaches, such as having HUD directly initiate projects with integrative potential, Trasviña noted his bureau works alongside the Office of Community Planning and Development and other HUD divisions to ensure that federal support for local and non-profit investments takes fair housing into account. But, he said, “Are we going to turn the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity into a grants and building program? No.”)
How effective is this approach of incentives and guidance and helping hands likely to be? Much depends, said David Rusk, an urban policy consultant and former mayor of Albuquerque, on the structure of local government. In states with strong, representative regional bodies in place — Rusk calls them “big box” states, because decision-making happens across a broader area — incentives can be powerful ways for the federal government to shape choices about housing and land use. But in “little box” states with small, autonomous governments, parochial concerns prevail. (This describes much of the Northeast and parts of the Midwest; New Jersey alone, for example, has 566 municipalities, each with its own zoning authority, and even more school districts.) “That’s where the incentive strategy falls short,” Rusk said. Affluent communities in those states “are never going to give in — they have to be told.” But the extent to which HUD is prepared to do the telling, when and where it is necessary, remains to be seen.
HUD’s language about the need for locally directed processes and the uniqueness of each place sounds sensible — so sensible that it can be easy to forget there are alternatives. But consider what has happened over the last decade in another policy area that has traditionally been left to local communities: education. The No Child Left Behind Act, passed during the Bush Administration, mandated the collection of extensive data sets in all school districts and established benchmarks for future performance (though it left the actual standards up to the states). And Obama’s Department of Education, led by Arne Duncan, has championed a controversial “turnaround” model for struggling schools, boosted federal subsidies for favored alternatives such as charter schools, and devised the Race to the Top program that distributed billions of dollars through competitive grants — an incentive program with considerable coercive force. Duncan’s approach has made some enemies. But it has also shown that the federal government can, when it chooses to, press a particular vision of reform on local government.
Ironically, this bold activity in education is in the service of a program that is, in the eyes of critics, insufficient — in large part because, unlike the more tentative steps to date on the housing front, it does not emphasize economic or racial integration. When it comes to housing, the Administration has articulated both an “inside game” strategy (improving conditions within poor communities) and an “outside game” approach (looking for ways to open up well-off areas). But in education, says Richard Kahlenberg of The Century Foundation, “the Administration’s efforts take as a given that our schools are going to be segregated, and then do their best at trying to make separate schools equal.” Even when the two agencies are formally aligned, as in the joint Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative (NRI) — which encompasses HUD’s Choice Neighborhoods program and the Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhoods effort — the overall emphasis is on bringing greater resources to “distressed neighborhoods.” While the Choice program is designed to foster mixed-income neighborhoods, during a recent hour-long Web chat about the NRI featuring representatives from four federal agencies, the topic of economic (and racial) integration did not come up.
Though school policy and housing policy have traditionally been treated as independent of each other, they are, in fact, intimately linked — especially with respect to integration. Unless other interventions are in place, segregated neighborhoods will create segregated schools, and segregated schools will perpetuate segregated neighborhoods. And, as the Boston busing crisis and similar skirmishes around the country showed a generation ago, segregated schools and neighborhoods are often fiercely defended. The Administration’s choice not to prioritize integration in school policy today can probably be understood, in part, as a desire not to refight those battles.
Some education advocates defend the thrust of the Administration’s policy on pragmatic grounds. “We tried basically for a generation to bring kids to good schools… and it failed,” says Andrew Rotherham, co-founder of the nonprofit organization Bellwether Education Partners and author of the blog Eduwonk.com. And the legal and political environment is, if anything, less hospitable now than it was a generation ago, when courts imposed busing plans in an effort to integrate classrooms. “I’m a lot more interested in efforts that can create 2,000 good new seats in a community in a year or two” than in a long-term effort to shift the landscape, Rotherham says. (At the same time, he said, both the federal government and states can do more to create choices and opportunities for students served by weak schools — such as giving more affluent districts financial incentives to accept students from low-income areas, an idea also championed by some administration critics.)
Critics, though, note how difficult it is to improve student performance in racially or economically segregated schools, even with high-quality teachers and investments in other services. A recent New York Times article, for example, noted that academic progress in the Harlem Children’s Zone — the model for the Promise Neighborhoods program — has been halting, despite the resources that have been provided both inside and outside the classroom.