Urban Decolonization

Norrinda Brown Hayat October, 2018

National fair housing legislation opened up higher opportunity neighborhoods to multitudes of middle-class African Americans. In actuality, the FHA offered much less to the millions of poor, Black residents in inner cities than it did to the Black middle class. Partly in response to the FHA’s inability to provide quality housing for low-income blacks, Congress has pursued various mobility strategies designed to facilitate the integration of low-income Blacks into high-opportunity neighborhoods as a resolution to the persistent dilemma of the ghetto. These efforts, too, have had limited success. Now, just over fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act and the Housing Choice Voucher Program (commonly known as Section 8), large numbers of African Americans throughout the country remain geographically isolated in urban ghettos. America’s neighborhoods are deeply segregated and Blacks have been relegated to the worst of them. This isolation has been likened to colonialism of an urban kind. To combat the housing conditions experienced by low-income Blacks, in recent years, housing advocates have reignited a campaign to add “source of income” protection to the federal Fair Housing Act as a means to open up high-opportunity neighborhoods to low-income people of color.

This Article offers a critique of overreliance on integration and mobility programs to remedy urban colonialism. Integration’s ineffectiveness as a tool to achieve quality housing for masses of economically-subordinated Blacks has been revealed both in the historically White suburbs and the recently gentrified inner city. Low-income Blacks are welcome in neither place. Thus, this Article argues that, focusing modern fair housing policy on the relatively small number of Black people for whom mobility is an option (either through high incomes or federal programs) is shortsighted, given the breadth of need for quality housing in economically-subordinated inner-city communities. As an alternative, this Article proposes, especially in the newly wealthy gentrified cities, that fair housing advocates, led by Black tenants, insist that state and local governments direct significant resources to economically depressed majority-minority neighborhoods and house residents equitably. This process of equitable distribution of local government resources across an entire jurisdiction, including in majority-minority neighborhoods, may be a critical step towards urban decolonization.

Introduction

In 1963, James Baldwin and station KQED filmed Take This Hammer , a documentary portraying life for Blacks living in San Francisco.¹ For much of the film, Baldwin was driven around the inner city to speak to Black community members about their conditions.² Lack of employment, absence of political power, and relegation to ghettos had led to an intense sense of group frustration among Blacks in the city.³ Also featured in the film, however, was the promise of integrated housing coming to fruition in a notoriously liberal city.⁴ At one point, for example, Bald-win’s companion points out the ILW housing project, which by then consisted of 70 percent White residents and 30 percent Black residents.⁵ ILW stood as a symbol of what the future held—the uplifting of Black families through mobility.⁶ It would take another five years before the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA) would bring this same promise of integration to the entire nation.⁷ National fair housing legislation, civil rights proponents hoped, would open up higher-opportunity neighborhoods to multitudes of African Americans.⁸

In actuality, the FHA offered much less to the millions of poor, Black residents in inner cities than it did to the Black middle class.⁹ Partly in response to the FHA’s inability to provide quality housing for low-income blacks, Congress has pursued various mobility strategies designed to facilitate the integration of low-income Blacks into high-opportunity neighborhoods as a resolution to the persistent dilemma of the ghetto.¹⁰ These efforts, too, have had limited success. Now, just over fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act and the Housing Choice Voucher Program (commonly known as Section 8), large numbers of African Americans throughout the country remain geographically isolated in urban ghettos.¹¹ San Francisco, the site of Baldwin’s study, saw integration only in isolated spots.¹² The conditions of Black lives that he witnessed in 1968 either remain unimproved or are worse for masses of economically subordinated Blacks.¹³ The story is much the same in other major American cities.¹⁴ America’s neighborhoods are deeply segregated and Blacks have been relegated to the worst of them.¹⁵ This economic isolation has been likened to colonialism of an urban kind.¹⁶ To combat the housing conditions experienced by low-income Blacks, in recent years, housing advocates have reignited a campaign to add “source of income” protection to the federal Fair Housing Act as a means to open up high-opportunity neighborhoods to low-income people of color.¹⁷

This Article offers a critique of overreliance on integration and mobility programs to remedy urban colonialism. Integration’s ineffectiveness as a tool to achieve quality housing for masses of economically subordinated Blacks has been revealed both in the historically White suburbs and the recently gentrified inner city. Low-income Blacks are welcome in neither place. Thus, this Article argues that focusing modern fair housing policy on the relatively small number of Black people for whom mobility is an option (either through high incomes or federal programs) is shortsighted, given the breadth of need for quality housing in economically subordinated inner-city communities. As an alternative, this Article pro-poses, especially in the newly wealthy cities, that fair housing advocates, led by Black tenants, should insist that state and local governments direct significant resources to economically depressed majority-minority neighborhoods and house residents equitably. This process of equitable distribution of local government resources across an entire jurisdiction, including in majority-minority neighborhoods, may be a critical step towards urban decolonization.

In Part I, the Article reviews the evidence suggesting that widespread residential segregation has existed for masses of Blacks since Emancipation and in spite of civil rights laws and mobility programs, and that this isolation strongly resembles colonization. Part II analyzes the barriers to integration and mobility for low-income Blacks, including discrimination. This Part then suggests that discriminatory conduct pre- and post-acquisition of suitable housing makes segregation hard to disband and mobility challenging in both historically White suburbs and recently gentrified inner cities. To more effectively resolve the dilemma of lack of quality housing for masses of economically subordinated Blacks, Part III proposes that social justice lawyers expand their notion of fair housing policy to include the equitable development of Black communities. Part III proposes steps for these lawyers to aid in undoing the effects of urban isolation and colonization, especially in cities undergoing reurbanization, including: (1) working with their clients to recover the value in Black communities; (2) assisting community members in organizing for ownership; and (3) advocating for local governments to democratize redevelopment.

I. Mobility as the Prescription for Urban Colonialism

This Part briefly reviews the history of Black geographic isolation in America and the compromise to pursue integration through Black mobility as the nearly exclusive path to quality housing for all Blacks. It also reviews evidence suggesting mobility programs have had mixed success in achieving integration for masses of economically subordinated individuals among that group.

A. Urban Colonialism

For more than a century, Blacks living in northern cities have been isolated in urban ghettos.¹⁸ Beginning in the late 19th century, following Emancipation, northern and midwestern cities struggled with how and where to house their emerging poor Black populations.¹⁹ To be clear, there “was no Elysian era of color blindness in northern housing mar-kets.”²⁰ The slums and tenements that pre-dated Emancipation were exclusively occupied by Whites, largely because there was no sizeable Black population in the North.²¹ It would be sometime after Emancipation before northern cities made even minimal efforts to house newly immigrated Blacks.²² Even then, housing was segregated. In 1902, for example, the founders of settlement houses in Boston’s South End, “[e]pitomizing the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine of the day,” formed a separately located house for Blacks, the Robert Gould Shaw House.²³ Boston was more proactive than most northern cities.²⁴ Despite the migration of hundreds of thousands of southern Blacks north and west during and following World War I, no more than a half a dozen settlements were even designated for Blacks before the Second World War.²⁵ Some settlement houses ceased operating, “rather than serve a local constituency that had become newly [B]lack.”²⁶

The Great Depression slowed the migration of Blacks moving north, further delaying the need for northern and midwestern cities to decide where to house them.²⁷ The Blacks that had previously migrated north were isolated.²⁸ Nearly entire urban Black populations across hundreds of cities lived in “well-defined ghettos” in the Depression years.²⁹ After the Depression, this isolation in the ghettos remained largely unchanged.³⁰ The only difference was that there were now more Blacks.³¹ Blacks resumed migration from the rural South to the North after the Depression in still larger numbers.³² In major cities throughout the country, the Black population expanded during the 1940s between 40 and 100 percent.³³ Black urbanization across the country passed 50 percent after 1940, and the Black population nearly caught up with the White population.³⁴

Geographers mapping the stratification and location of groups in American cities have identified a change that occurred after the Great Depression resulting from the “interrelated and government-supported mixture of massive suburbanization,³⁵ growth in the automobile industry, and expansion within key consumer durables markets.”³⁶ This change, which is sometimes referred to as “the spatial fix,” led the federal government to financially aid Whites who had previously inhabited inner cities in relocating out of those cities and into newly developed suburbs,³⁷ and to then shield their newly designated spaces from integration through laws.³⁸ The development of these new suburbs left the inner city exclusively to Blacks.

Decades of Black isolation in inner cities followed the spatial fix. By 1965, three out of every four Blacks lived in the city, and approximately one of two in northern cities.³⁹ Ninety-five percent of all northern Blacks lived in the city.⁴⁰ The highest concentration of Blacks was in eleven cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Baltimore, Cleveland, Houston, and New Orleans. Each of these cities had Black populations of between 200,000 and one million,⁴¹ and in each of these cities Blacks were “compelled to live in concentrated ghettos.”⁴² These ghettos shared certain characteristics: economic and social decay, under-employment, familial instability, and housing decay.⁴³ For example, urban critic Jane Jacobs described Washington’s Southwest as a place “blackballed by geography” and “buffeted by official whims.”⁴⁴ The conditions inside inner-city dwellings were such that having bathrooms, kitchen sinks, central heating, and electric lights were luxuries of “extreme rarity.”⁴⁵ Moreover, the housing to which Blacks had access was expensive and overcrowded.⁴⁶ Taking Harlem as an example, Professor Kenneth Clark noted that in 1965 “there were more people in fewer rooms (in Harlem) than elsewhere in the city” and yet the rents were high.⁴⁷ The same was true in Chicago and Baltimore.⁴⁸ Regardless of their income levels, all, except a relatively few Blacks, lived in the inner-city, while Whites lived everywhere else.⁴⁹ During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Blacks called on the federal government to address both the housing isolation and the conditions experienced there.⁵⁰

In the over fifty years since the Civil Rights Movement, neither fair housing laws nor government-sponsored mobility programs have significantly altered this landscape. A majority of economically subordinated Blacks are isolated in inner cities in a pattern that is in fact or strongly resembles colonization.⁵¹

B. The Fair Housing Act, the Voucher Program & Mobility’s Promise

In 1967, a second march on Washington was planned to bring attention to the ills associated with poverty, including poor housing.⁵² Specifically, the leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign⁵³ called for the redistribution of political and economic power to provide quality jobs, education, and housing to the poor.⁵⁴ In March 1968, at the early gather-ings of the Poor People’s Campaign, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other activists, like Johnnie Tillmon of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), began to outline their platform’s major elements.⁵⁵ A central aspect of the platform was to petition the government to pass an Economic Bill of Rights as a step toward alleviating poverty.⁵⁶ That bill, it was hoped, would, at a minimum, provide a $30 billion annual appropriation for a war on poverty, full employment and guaranteed income legislation, and the construction of 500,000 low-cost housing units per year until slums were eliminated.⁵⁷

As a direct result of conversations with these civil rights activists, the Johnson Administration’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—commonly known as the Kerner Commission—published the “Report on the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders” in 1967.⁵⁸ The report held out the institutionalization of segregated ghettos as one of the culprits behind the civil unrest plaguing many American cities and recommended significant investment in housing opportunities, specifically those designed to curtail segregation.⁵⁹ The Kerner Report asserted “Black in-migration and [W]hite exodus… have produced the massive and growing concentrations of impoverished Negros in our major cities, creating a growing crisis of deteriorating facilities and services and unmet human needs.”⁶⁰

argued that a “[d]eclining tax base, poor sanitation, loss of jobs, inadequate educational opportunity, and urban squalor will persist as long as discrimination forces millions to live in the rotting cores of central cities.”⁶¹ Senator Edward Brooke, himself Black, offered: “we can and should make it possible for those who can to move to where the better schools and services, the decent homes and jobs are most plentiful. That is the simple purpose of this bill.”⁶² The FHA was designed as a tool for mobility.

By 1968, the notion that integration was the surest path to greater opportunity for Blacks had precedent.⁶³ Five decades earlier, in 1917, the Supreme Court in Buchannan v. Warley held that ordinances prohibiting African Americans from owning or renting property in White neighbor-hoods were illegal.⁶⁴ In 1948, in Shelley v. Kramer, the Court banned covenants in real estate transactions between private parties that prohibited sale to Black people.⁶⁵ Most notably, however, was Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, in which the Supreme Court remedied lack of quality education for Blacks by proscribing de jure segregation and ending the “dual system” of separate White and Black schools.⁶⁶ This decision thus also played a role in securing integration as the legal path to quality housing for Blacks.⁶⁷ In each of these cases, the majority expressed a belief in the notion that the problems confronting the inhabitants of inner city ghettos could be eradicated if the barriers to Black mobility were removed. Integration had been the goal for at least five decades by the time the Fair Housing Act was passed.⁶⁸

II. The Persistence of Segregation

In this Part, the article summarizes the persistence of segregation in urban centers, generally, and against the economically subordinated specifically.

A. Limitations on Black Mobility

Despite the FHA’s explicit ban on discrimination in housing sales and rentals, as well as an emerging body of case law broadly interpreting the FHA’s language,⁶⁹ segregated housing patterns worsened through the 1970s and 1980s.⁷⁰ Housing integration continued to be strongly opposed, and “White flight” to the suburbs provided an appealing alternative to staying in racially “threatened” neighborhoods.⁷¹ By 2000, more people lived in suburbs than in central cities and rural areas combined.⁷² Many of these suburbs had no significant Black population 30 years after the Act’s passage.⁷³ Sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton have noted that “[e]ven if [B]lack incomes had continued to climb through the 1970s, segregation would not have declined: no matter how much [B]lacks earned they remained spatially separated from [W]hites. Up until at least 1980, money did not buy entry into [W]hite neighborhoods of American cities.”⁷⁴ In major cities like Chicago and Cleveland, where significant Black populations (including those with financial means) existed, the average segregation factor was 90.6 and 88.2, respectively, indicating an extremely high degree of segregation.⁷⁵

A number of explanations have been offered for why segregation persists despite the FHA. Personal choices of Blacks, some argue, are responsible for continued housing segregation.⁷⁶ There is evidence, however, that Blacks overwhelmingly choose to live in integrated neighbor-hoods when provided with the opportunity.⁷⁷

Economic disparity patterns between Blacks and Whites have also been offered to explain segregation.⁷⁸ However, income differences alone account for “only ten to thirty-five percent of racial segregation actually observed.”⁷⁹ At least one study has shown that White residents’ perception of a neighborhood is negatively impacted the more Black residents are present in that neighborhood.⁸⁰ The argument here is that only a “middling amount” of integration can happen in any one White neighborhood before its residents will flee.⁸¹ This phenomenon is called “tipping.”⁸² There are simply too many Black people (especially those who are economically subordinated) and too few spaces in higher opportunity neighborhoods to achieve full integration.⁸³ The FHA, as it was designed, offered the greatest mobility to the Black middle and upper classes, which were well-positioned to integrate because they had the means to do so.⁸⁴ By making White protectionism illegal, the FHA opened up opportunity for those Blacks who possessed the financial wherewithal and cultural norms required for assimilation to do so. Alternatively, the FHA offered little to economically subordinated Blacks.

Subsequent to the passage of the FHA, in an attempt to increase housing opportunities for the economically subordinated in the rental market, Congress passed mobility programs, including notably the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, which established the Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP or, as it is commonly called “Section 8”).⁸⁵ The HCVP subsidizes housing costs, in the form of a voucher, which can be used to obtain market rate homes in high-opportunity neighborhoods.⁸⁶ Theoretically, a voucher should help a family relocate from a lower-opportunity neighborhood to a higher one. Federal mobility programs have met “mixed success,” especially for families of color.⁸⁷

Approximately 2.2 million households participate in federal mobility programs, providing them the resources to relocate to higher-opportunity neighborhoods.⁸⁸ Yet, the vast majority of these programs’ participants live in lower-opportunity, racially segregated neighbor-hoods.⁸⁹

In 1992, Congress authorized the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to engage in “a 10-year research demonstration [which] combined tenant-based rent assistance with housing counseling to help very low-income families move from poverty-stricken urban areas to low-poverty neighborhoods.”⁹⁰ This study, called Moving to Opportunity (MTO), followed 4,608 families in five metropolitan cities,⁹¹ the vast majority of which were headed by African American or Hispanic single mothers, to determine whether access to a voucher with no limitations affected family and child outcomes.⁹² MTO was designed to “develop more effective mobility strategies for recipients of tenant-based housing assistance in metropolitan areas throughout the Nation.”⁹³

A follow-up study to the original MTO study reconnected with participants four to seven years later and found that the MTO succeeded in moving families to less economically distressed communities and that families reported feeling safer and having more positive mental health.⁹⁴ On the other hand, the follow-up study found that there was no detectable effect on the labor market outcomes, social programs, or reading and math achievement for children.⁹⁵ A subsequent study, conducted by Raj Chetty in 2015, found improved outcomes for the children of MTO families.⁹⁶ Specifically, those children under the age of thirteen when their families moved had significantly higher college attendance rates and earnings.⁹⁷ These children also lived in better neighborhoods as adults and were less likely to be single parents.⁹⁸ Despite this good news, even the Department of Housing and Urban Development acknowledged that “an array of barriers,” including market conditions and discrimination, “force[d] even those with vouchers to rent housing in neighborhoods of intense poverty.”⁹⁹

B. Discrimination Against Economically Subordinated Blacks in the High-Opportunity Suburbs

Segregation persists in high-opportunity neighborhoods despite the Fair Housing Act and mobility programs, at least in part, because Blacks face unchecked discrimination when attempting to live in high-opportunity neighborhoods both pre- and post-acquisition of housing.

1. Pre-Acquisition Barriers to Mobility

In many localities, participants in mobility programs face unfettered discrimination on the real estate market when attempting to acquire suitable housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods.¹⁰⁰ One study conducted by the Lawyer’s Committee for Better Housing (LCBH), which focused on Chicago, found that “significant discrimination against families based on their source of income” drastically reduced the available housing market for these households.¹⁰¹ Utilizing testers, the LCBH study revealed that in higher-opportunity neighborhoods “55 [percent] of land-lords refused to accept Housing Choice Vouchers as suitable rental payment… and an additional 16 [percent]… equivocate about accept-ing [vouchers] as a means of rental payment.”¹⁰² In Chicago, more generally, the study also found that “46 [percent] of landlords refused to accept [vouchers] and 22 [percent] of landlords equivocate.”¹⁰³ Put another way, “[v]oucher holders [were] denied access to approximately 70 [percent] of the market rate units that [were] supposedly available to them.”¹⁰⁴

There is evidence to suggest that families of color suffer the greatest harm from pre-acquisition discrimination.¹⁰⁵ The LCBH study reveals “[v]oucher holders face[d] additional illegal discrimination based on race or ethnicity.”¹⁰⁶ For example, when testing a studio for $475 in Jefferson Park, the landlord told a White Section 8 recipient that he or she was accepted, that a lower level apartment was available, and that apartments were available in a unit across the street.¹⁰⁷ Ninety-five minutes later, the landlord told a similarly situated Black individual that there were no available apartments because too many other were people interested and he wanted to choose from that pool of people.¹⁰⁸ In that same study, when testing a one-bedroom advertised for $685 in 2002, the landlord told a White individual that the voucher was accepted and two one-bedroom apartments were available.¹⁰⁹ The landlord then told a Black individual that the voucher was acceptable but no apartments were available at the time.¹¹⁰ Importantly, Chicago is among the many cities with laws currently prohibiting discrimination based on source of income.¹¹¹

2. Post-Acquisition Barriers to Mobility

Participants in mobility programs continue to experience discrimination after successfully relocating to high-opportunity neighborhoods.¹¹² Professor Rahim Kurwa calls this discrimination in the “context of reception.”¹¹³ By this Kurwa means that high-opportunity neighborhoods are often so hostile that voucher holder families relocate after some time back to the communities from which they arrived, either because they were actually or constructively evicted.¹¹⁴ For example, suburbanites opposing diversity in their communities sometimes encourage their elected officials to use municipal law to ban certain conduct perceived to be associated with public housing and voucher holders.¹¹⁵ Some suburban towns have utilized law enforcement to monitor otherwise non-criminal behavior of Black residents, such as violations of various federal housing program rules, how many days a month a romantic partner can spend the night, maintenance of lawns, and volume of music.¹¹⁶ All of this is done in an effort to cause those residents to leave voluntarily or be removed from the community.

In Williams v. City of Antioch ,¹¹⁷ more than 800 African Americans filed a lawsuit against the city of Antioch for engaging in a concerted campaign to reduce the Black population and discourage any additional Black families from moving to the city.¹¹⁸ Antioch was not isolated. In June 2013, the Department of Justice issued a Findings Letter following its investigation of two cities in Los Angeles County, the Housing Authority of Los Angeles County (HACoLA), and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD).¹¹⁹ The DOJ found that the government entities had engaged in activities that resulted in violations of the Fair Housing Act and, in some instances, the Fourth Amendment by intimidating, harassing, and facilitating the termination of voucher holders from the program.¹²⁰ The sheriff’s department settled the lawsuit in May 2015.¹²¹

In one study conducted after the discrimination in Antelope Valley was exposed, Black voucher holders reported experiencing various forms of hostility (77 percent), hostility from neighbors (41 percent), and one or more incidents of aggressive policing (59 percent).¹²² The same study noted that voucher holders chose not to engage in some perfectly legal behavior in order to avoid scrutiny from their neighbors and community.¹²³ Neighbors and local government imposed an unspoken set of rules prohibiting otherwise innocuous conduct, such as having lights on late at night, leaving the garage door open, not taking in trash cans after garbage has been picked up, parking in front of the mailbox, having too nice of a car, lacking a car altogether, and having too many cars parked outside.¹²⁴ One voucher holder stated, “Now I just don’t play any music. I try to keep peace. No music, no company. Not that I had a lot of traffic anyways. I just try to stay to myself.”¹²⁵

These stories serves as examples of the difficulties with social integration that Blacks, especially those who are economically subordinated, experience in certain middle- to high-opportunity racially segregated neighborhoods.¹²⁶

C. Discrimination Against Economically Subordinated Blacks in the Gentrified Inner City

Remaining in a gentrifying inner city has become complicated for economically subordinated Blacks who have historically resided there. By the 2000s, American cities, especially in the North, no longer followed the old pattern of rich, White suburb and poor, Black city.¹²⁷ Instead, highly paid “knowledge workers,” the affluent, and young people have returned in large numbers to certain large cities.¹²⁸

For example, in Washington, D.C., some reports estimate that between 2009 and 2013 approximately 48,742 people moved into the district.¹²⁹ The next year, between 2014 and 2015, an estimated 63,700 new residents migrated to the city.¹³⁰ These newcomers came from the surrounding suburbs, including Fairfax, Alexandria, and Arlington in Virginia as well as Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.¹³¹ But they also came from New York, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Chicago.¹³² D.C.’s new residents were overwhelmingly educated, wealthy, and White. The influx of new non-Blacks residents caused the Black population to dip below 50 percent for the first time in sixty years.¹³³ Some geographers and sociologists have labeled this shift the “great inversion,” while others call it “reorganization.”¹³⁴ As a result of reurbanization, many cities are wealthier than they have been in many decades, if ever.¹³⁵ But they are just as segregated.

The in-migration that has happened as a result of reurbanization is more variegated than it is truly inverted.¹³⁶ In Washington, D.C., much of the early redevelopment took place in upscale urban neighborhoods such as Georgetown, Cleveland Park, others in Northwest D.C., around downtown, and Capitol Hill where Blacks were displaced long ago.¹³⁷ Reurbanization, on the other hand, has taken place in multi-cultural hubs and displaced some people of color from neighborhoods such as Columbia Heights, U Street, and Brookland; however, Washington’s service class continues to occupy a significant cluster south and east of the district and extending into the nearby Prince George’s County, Maryland suburbs.¹³⁸ Indeed, “seven out of ten of the metro’s most concentrated service-class neighborhoods are still located in historically African American sections of the District itself, and two more are in Prince George’s County, which is almost 65 percent [B]lack.”¹³⁹ The housing conditions in these neighborhoods are substandard.¹⁴⁰

The same patterns occur in other major cities undergoing reurbanization. In San Francisco in 2016, following a wave of gentrification, of the 46,000 Blacks that remained in the city, a majority still lived in public housing.¹⁴¹ Similarly, in New York City, the 2000s began a period of prosperity,¹⁴² but on the heels of this economic resurgence, New York remained deeply segregated.¹⁴³ Specifically, the Black-White dissimilarity index remained at 81.6 in 2010, meaning that 82.5 percent of White or Black New Yorkers would have to move to a different neighborhood in order for Blacks and Whites to be equally distributed across neighbor-hoods.¹⁴⁴ Most importantly, the vast majority of people of color lived in the poorest neighborhoods.¹⁴⁵

Therefore, it is incorrect to say that the advantaged class has taken over these cities.¹⁴⁶ Instead, there is a “metropolitan landscape that is being split into areas of tightly clustered zones of concentrated advantage” amidst large swaths of the disadvantaged.¹⁴⁷ When, as a result of reurbanization, elite enclaves expand into historically Black neighborhoods, the new occupants have displaced the old occupants to varying degrees.¹⁴⁸

Deep segregation persists in San Francisco, Washington, and New York despite laws prohibiting discrimination based on source of income. The failure of each of these jurisdictions to realize desired neighborhood attainment for economically subordinated Blacks illuminates the vast distance between theoretical mobility and the practical ability to relocate. The same forces, including discrimination, that shape the movement of Black households in the larger real estate market work more starkly against economically subordinated Blacks seeking housing mobility as a means to economic advancement.¹⁴⁹

III. Urban Decolonization as Fair Housing Policy

Black people throughout the United States live almost exclusively in economically depressed Black neighborhoods.¹⁵⁰ These are the “Black bottoms, Black back sides, Black quarters, Black sections, and hoods that were creations of structure (i.e., institutional racism and segregation) and agency (the Black mapping of American space since Emancipation.)”¹⁵¹ In some cases, this isolation has been of their own choosing,¹⁵² but in most cases it has not.¹⁵³ Fair housing policy has largely ignored Black spaces, focusing instead on de-segregation. The integration agenda absolves local governments of the responsibility to invest in majority-minority communities to the detriment of their residents for whom mobility is not an option. The following Part of this Article argues that now, as certain neoliberal cities undergo reurbanization, fair housing advocacy should be expanded to include spatial equity through the democratization of redevelopment. This Part calls on fair housing lawyers to shift focus, particularly as it relates to the neighborhoods in which economically subordinated Blacks live, to urge local governments to invest in majority-minority communities by first: 1) acknowledging the value in Black communities; 2) assisting communities in organizing for ownership; and 3) advocating for the democratization of redevelopment. Ultimately, this Part proposes that residents, advocates, and local policymakers should pursue housing policy that favors deeply inclusive redevelopment by providing housing for residents of majority-minority neighborhoods while those residents remain in place.

A. Recovering the Value in Black Communities

Mobility is not the only solution to the ills of inadequate housing for economically subordinated Blacks as a group. Professor John Calmore offered that “[s]patial equality is a group-based remedy that focuses on opportunity and circumstances within [B]lack communities and demands that both be improved, enriched, and equalized.”¹⁵⁴ Short of this, Cal-more argued, “[B]lacks, as a group, will be left with the inadequate ‘remedy’ of individuals choosing, or being forced, to move to ‘better’ space somewhere else.”¹⁵⁵ The convergence of the civil rights agenda, the conservative anti-government platform, and liberal thought regarding the solution to housing inequity resulted in a devaluation in Black communities that has been followed by disinvestment. Mobility programs are often at odds with many Black residents’ desires for community, safety, and agency.¹⁵⁶ Problematically, the mobility agenda did not take into account the views of the tenants themselves.¹⁵⁷ “As public housing projects were dis-mantled in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, New Orleans and Baltimore (cities with the largest numbers of public housing units demolished), tenants often found their circumstances changing in ways that either defied their will or left them without a viable alternative for housing.”¹⁵⁸ Tenants were forced to leave meaningful communities and reported losing bonds with their neighbors.¹⁵⁹ Many of these tenants were, of course, provided vouchers.¹⁶⁰

Black civic and social life beyond the White gaze.”¹⁶¹ One of the most famous of these independent Black towns is Zora Neale Hurston’s beloved Eatonville, Florida.¹⁶² Eatonville was not an anomaly. At least sixty such towns were established in the period between the Civil War and World War I.¹⁶³ For example, Greenwood, Oklahoma, home of “Black Wall Street,” was once one of the most prominent concentrations of African American businesses in the United States.¹⁶⁴ An exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) explores this history of thriving all-Black towns. The exhibit includes Nicodemus, Kansas, where 350 settlers left Kentucky to escape the Jim Crow South and established a newspaper, bank, hotel, and schools.¹⁶⁵ There are still other, more recent, examples. Of note is Washington, D.C., which was long referred to as “Chocolate City,” because of its thriving majority-Black population, many of whom were home-owners.¹⁶⁶

Fair housing advocates working on behalf of these residents, informed by their clients’ goals and desires, should consider rethinking their strategies and alliances to protect and further grow the positive equity in these communities rather than assisting in disbanding them. Two ways of doing so are 1) aiding the communities they serve to organize for ownership and 2) lobbying local governments, especially in reurbanized neoliberal cities, to democratize redevelopment, as described below.

B. Community Organizing for Cooperative Ownership

Black tenants living in economically depressed neighborhoods might consider initiating or accelerating the incubation of democratically organized enterprises in their communities. Through the creation of democratically organized enterprises, such as limited-equity housing cooperatives, these residents might transform their status from renters into owners while improving the quality of their housing and maintaining their communal ties.¹⁶⁷

Black cooperativism has been a vehicle for African Americans, having been “excluded from other economic options” since Emancipation, to address economic need.¹⁶⁸ For example, between 1865 and 1883, African American caulkers and stevedores owned their own cooperative, the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company in Baltimore, Maryland.¹⁶⁹ When White carpenters boycotted shipyards who used African American caulkers, a group of Black men decided to form a cooperative to own their own shipyard as a way to protect the security of their jobs.¹⁷⁰ The Chesapeake Marine Railway was successful. The founders raised $40,000 selling 8,000 shares at $5 per share.¹⁷¹ They paid off their $30,000 mortgage in five years, employed between 100 and 200 Black and White members, and paid dividends between 4 and 10 percent per year for four years.¹⁷² By 1907, W.E.B. Du Bois, himself a strong supporter of Black cooperativism, documented the existence of 154 African American-owned cooperatives, including fourteen “producer cooperatives,” three “transportation cooperatives,” 103 “distribution or consumer cooperatives,” and thirty-four “real estate and credit cooperatives.”¹⁷³

The Freedom Quilting Bee, a handicraft cooperative formed in 1966 in Alberta, Alabama, is another example of successful Black cooperativism.¹⁷⁴ The Freedom Bee was established because of the lack of stable income-generating opportunities for women in sharecropping families.¹⁷⁵ These women began by selling quilts, but eventually developed other entrepreneurial strategies, including the purchase of twenty-three acres of land in 1968.¹⁷⁶ The cooperative used this land to build a sewing plant and also sold some to sharecropping families who had been evicted from their homes.¹⁷⁷ At a point, the cooperative, with its 150 members, was the largest employer in the town.¹⁷⁸ By 1992, in addition to the sewing plant, the cooperative owned a day care center and operated after school tutoring and summer reading programs.¹⁷⁹ The number of Black cooperatives continued to grow throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.¹⁸⁰

In the more recent past, cooperative developments have been especially useful in addressing “underdevelopment and isolation in inner cities,” particularly in the housing context.¹⁸¹ In the midst of a wave of gentrification in Washington, D.C. during the 1980s and 1990s, numerous limited equity cooperatives were formed for the purpose of purchasing and thus taking control over their housing.¹⁸² The benefits of cooperativism in this context were four-fold, providing the new owner’s: (1) autonomy; (2) affordability; (3) stability; and (4) community.¹⁸³ Professor Amanda Huron recounts the stories of numerous such co-ops, including the Aspen, Dogwood, and Mulberry Cooperatives, in her book Carving Out the Commons .¹⁸⁴ The Aspen Cooperative, for example, formed in the Glover Park neighborhood of D.C. in the early 1980s after receiving eviction notices from their landlord on Christmas Eve in 1977.¹⁸⁵ At a time in the District, where “housing costs were spiraling upward and condominium conversion was rampant, the work of these tenants— mostly [B]lack, mostly women—was helping keep housing within reach for low income residents.”¹⁸⁶ Today, a very small percentage of Washing-ton’s housing stock are limited equity cooperatives.¹⁸⁷

There has been renewed and accelerated interest in cooperativism in some Black communities in recent years. In 2013, Cooperation Jackson, a network of “worker-owned and democratically self-managed enterprises” formed to address the needs of Jackson, Mississippi’s working class residents.¹⁸⁸ Cooperation Jackson’s platform is three-pronged, including grassroots community organizing, electoral political strategies, and incubating democratic economic initiatives and cooperatives.¹⁸⁹ In 2018, in Newark, New Jersey, Urban Cooperative Enterprise Legal Center evolved out of a “plan to provide alternatives to communities that have been neglected by mainstream economic and political systems, such as the formerly incarcerated.”¹⁹⁰ UCELC “combin[es] economic development with social and ecological development” in an effort to create “a new form of enterprise that is both sustainable and effective at making self-sufficient low and moderate income communities.”¹⁹¹

Cooperativism offers agency to residents over both the conditions of their housing and where and with whom they live.¹⁹²

C. Democratizing Redevelopment in Reurbanizing Cities

The state must play a critical role in supporting the conditions for diverse economies to flourish amidst capitalism.¹⁹³ Local governments are the gatekeepers over the commodity developers seek—land—and for it they might consider extracting a higher price where conditions are ripe to do so.¹⁹⁴ There is promise, especially in newly wealthy, reurbanized cities, for mutually beneficial partnerships between majority-minority communities and local governments; fair housing advocates can help local goverments navigate those relationships. For the reurbanizing city, there are moral but also practical motivations for redeveloping equitably. More specifically, inhabitants of the urban center are the members of the service class needed to support the infrastructure of reurbanization. Cities can engage in equitable, place-based policymaking and invest deeply in majority-minority neighborhoods by: 1) passing enabling legislation for democratically organized enterprises, including LECs; 2) engaging in tax reform that benefits these entities; and 3) directing public funds towards projects that will increase and improve the stock of affordable housing, including in majority-minority communities.

Some progressive local governments have already begun to experiment with innovative models of stemming displacement and increasing the stock of quality and affordable housing available to economically sub-ordinated Black constituents. In Houston, Texas, for example, Mayor Sylvester Turner has set about creating a community land trust¹⁹⁵ with the aim of making homeownership throughout the city more affordable.¹⁹⁶ The proposed pilot program, Complete Communities, is meant to direct investment to five neighborhoods that have historically been under-served, including the city’s historically African American Third Ward.¹⁹⁷

Furthermore, Complete Communities is not happening in a vacuum. It is a key part of the city’s response to persistent fair housing law-suits directed at it by the federal government and concerns from housing advocates that Houston will not spend recovery money in line with fair housing goals.¹⁹⁸ No new funding was acquired at the time of the pilot’s launch.¹⁹⁹ Instead, the mayor has promised “60 percent of the city’s federal housing funds as well as 60 percent of the housing funds from local tax increment reinvestment zones would be directed toward the five neighborhoods.”²⁰⁰ Importantly, with respect to the Third Ward, Houston’s plan anticipates the city playing a “supportive” role and the community organizing itself to lead the contemplated plans for affordable housing, jobs, and education contemplated by the pilot.²⁰¹

Another model might include a city levying taxes directly on the highest-grossing employers to fund the building of affordable housing. On May 14, 2018, Seattle’s city council unanimously passed an “ambitious” tax on the city’s lead employers, called the “head tax” or the “Amazon tax,” to fund affordable housing development and fight homelessness.²⁰² As passed, each company with a gross of at least $10 million would have been required to pay $275 per employee.²⁰³ The tax would have affected 3 percent of the businesses in the city.²⁰⁴ Retail giant Amazon, for example, has 45,000 employees in Seattle, and would have to pay $10 million each year.²⁰⁵ Seattle has the third largest homeless population in the country, behind only Los Angeles and New York.²⁰⁶ There are racial justice implications for the Seattle council’s plan. Black people are 6.2 percent of Seattle’s overall population, but 29.2 percent of its homeless population.²⁰⁷ Ultimately, the “head tax” was designed to generate $47 million over five years for “publicly owned and permanently affordable housing.”²⁰⁸ In an unfortunate turn, and under substantial pressure from Amazon, on June 12, 2018 the council repealed the tax just one month after its passage.²⁰⁹

Knitting private development together with job creation may present still a third model. In Washington, D.C., the “First Source Hiring Law” was enacted in 1984 to “ensure that city residents are given priority for new jobs created by municipal financing and development pro-grams.”²¹⁰ First Source requires the mayor to include for every government-assisted project totaling between $300,000 and $5,000,000, a provision that at least 51 percent of the new employees hired be District residents.²¹¹ While not new, the “first source law” is getting renewed attention in response to the rapid reurbanization taking place in the city, particularly in the construction industry.²¹² In 2018, the city council endeavored to strengthen the “first source” program calling for large-scale improvements to its delivery.²¹³

The efforts these three cities are making are important, innovative first steps, and other cities might consider taking up such projects. Whether any of these projects could have long-lasting impact on the quality of life for residents in majority-minority communities remains to be seen. However, there are more mature examples that should give us hope. In Austin, for example, the Guadalupe Community Land Trust creates affordable housing and works with residents with “long-standing ties to East Austin” whose incomes are at or below 80 percent of the area median income to become homebuyers since 1984.²¹⁴

Some Black communities and their advocates may be skeptical of working with the state, thinking it is too oppressive and wrapped up with capitalism to be a genuine partner.²¹⁵ This skepticism is understandable.²¹⁶ It is the state after all that has abandoned its lower classes, especially economically subordinated Blacks, time and again, making the current “reclamation of the commons” necessary in the first place.²¹⁷ For example, the historical troubles with implementation surrounding D.C.’s “First Source” law and the swift and fierce attacks on Seattle’s “head tax” suggest the road ahead will be long and fraught. Ultimately, these are simply three examples among many possibilities. Other models should be explored based on the particular community and context.

Conclusion

In his film Remigration , Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins, tells a dystopian tale of San Francisco sometime in the not-so far off future where hyper-gentrification has forced all middle and lower income workers, mostly racial minorities, inland.²¹⁸ In one scene, Baldwin’s “ Take This Hammer ” hauntingly plays on the television.²¹⁹ Hearing Baldwin speak about housing in San Francisco for Blacks pre-Fair Housing Act in the “future,” one cannot help but reflect on how little has changed in the post-FHA era. That was no doubt Jenkins’ point.

Blacks, even in reurbanized liberal cities, especially the economically subordinated, continue to be housed in majority-minority neighbor-hoods where conditions and opportunity are lacking.²²⁰ This motif is largely either unchanged or worsened by the expansion of neoliberal gentrification. Neither the Fair Housing Act nor mobility programs have significantly altered this landscape.²²¹

Moreover, the costs to communities of color of the continued push for mobilization, including the diminishment of community ties in their historic neighborhoods and the risk of personal safety in their new neighborhoods, may be well greater than their desire to pay. The residents of Black communities recognize the value in their space and are accelerating efforts to organize for ownership to stem the tide of displacement.²²²

Fair housing advocates for these communities would be wise to take the lead for their clients by supporting organizing efforts. Advocates could lobby local governments to use the capital gained through reurbanization to improve the housing of economically subordinated Blacks already in place. More specifically, cities could invest in majority-Black communities instead of disbanding or further isolating them. Possible vehicles for this support could be the limited equity cooperatives, community land trusts, and innovative taxation models that improve public housing and job creation through development. Fifty years of experience with the Fair Housing Act tells us that these options may offer better opportunities for affordable and equitable housing for economically subordinated Blacks living in neoliberal cities than amending the Fair Housing Act to cover additional protected classes.