The Opinion Pages  | EDITORIAL 

The End of Federally Financed Ghettos

By 
Andrew Holder 
The Supreme Court issued an important ruling last month when it reminded state and local governments that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 bars them from spending federal housing money in a manner that perpetuates racial segregation.
Last week, the Obama administration took an even more important step — one that has already changed the decades-long discussion about how to combat residential segregation. It rewrote the rules under the provision of the act that requires state and local governments to “affirmatively further” housing goals by making real efforts to cope with the cumulative results of the discrimination that confined black Americans to ghettos in the first place.
For the new rules to be effective, federal officials need to make clear that local governments can lose federal housing aid if they persist in dumping subsidized housing into depressed, racially isolated communities instead of putting more of it in integrated areas that offer better schools and job opportunities.
The fact that it has taken nearly 50 years since the law’s passage for these common-sense changes to materialize is all the more distressing, given that federally sanctioned housing discrimination has played a central role in racial ghettoization.
The Fair Housing Act was intended to break down historic patterns of segregation. But it was undercut from the start by federal officials, including presidents who believed that segregation was the natural order of things. With the threat of sanctions almost nonexistent, many state and local governments confined subsidized housing to poor minority neighborhoods and found it quite easy to hide these wrongful practices behind ineffective, vaguely worded rules and loose oversight.
For example, under the old rules, governments receiving federal housing money in certain programs were required to perform an analysis of the local “impediments” to fair housing — but that analysis was generally not submitted to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees these programs. Local officials regularly argued that they did not have access to information that would allow them to make judgments about whether they were complying with the law.
That data issue is now off the table. Under the new rules, H.U.D. will furnish governments with extensive information, including data on segregated living patterns and concentrations of poverty. The process through which federal money is spent will be more transparent, which means the public will have a voice in decisions and housing rights advocates will be able to see quickly if governments are trying to evade the integration imperative. Local governments will not be expected to solve the segregation problem alone but will be encouraged to join with other jurisdictions in the region.
The new rule also provides a clear, forceful definition of the law. It explains that affirmatively furthering fair housing means “replacing segregated living patterns with truly integrated and balanced living patterns, transforming racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty into areas of opportunity, and fostering and maintaining compliance with civil rights and fair housing laws.”
The rule is a warning for governments and nonprofit housing developers that have an interest in building as much subsidized housing as quickly as possible and that have been roundly criticized for building too much of it in depressed areas and speciously calling the process “revitalization.” Builders will no longer be able to take the path of least resistance, avoiding better neighborhoods out of fear of not-in-my-backyard crusaders.
Critics are already describing the new rules as an example of overreach by the Obama administration. Far from it. The responsibilities laid out in the new rules were part of the Fair Housing Act all along but were ignored over decades by governments at all levels. The tragedy is that this has left the country more divided than it otherwise would have been.