Inclusive & Integrated Roads Not Taken: De Jure Fair Housing / De Facto Exclusions

WILLIAM TOOHEY III

Inclusive & Integrated Roads Not Taken: The Fault of De Jure Fair Housing in a Nation of De Facto Exclusions

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Inclusive & Integrated Roads Not Taken: The Fault of De Jure Fair Housing in a Nation of De Facto Exclusions William Toohey III Harvard University Graduate School of Design Cambridge, MA

Š 2018 William Toohey III. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The license requires that others who use this work in any way must properly credit the author, but not in a way that suggests the author endorses them or their use. www.williamtooheyiii.com 3

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Abstract This paper explores the implications of a history saturated by class and race relations that underpin the state of residential segregation in American cities. The brief yet far-reaching research contextualizes contemporary challenges for planning and design, explains the relevance of inclusive and integrated housing, and further articulates the urgent task for designers, planners, policymakers, elected officials, and ultimately, the public. This task demands of many actors to advocate for and commit to equitable paths forward to realize the unfulfilled potential of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. In this context, the agency of the contemporary urban designer-planner-policymaker collaboration is defined by not only advocacy for equity, but also the instrumentality of helping guide regulatory frameworks that facilitate more effective ways to plan and shape the city. The urban project for the contemporary moment is concerned with resolving and electrifying the reciprocal relationship between the public and the city. The success of this necessary but not inevitable endeavor will be critically appraised by the degree to which an extraordinary individual and collective effort is made to ensure a productive, safe, just, inclusive, and integrated society—a future where more of the population has reasons to collectively sustain and enjoy itself than escape or muddle through.

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Inclusive & Integrated Roads Not Taken: The Fault of De Jure Fair Housing in a Nation of De Facto Exclusions Introduction Over fifty years after the Fair Housing Act was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson and passed by the House of Representatives on April 11, 1968, the state of housing in America continues its rather exclusionary, de facto legacy as a separated and unequal landscape of opportunity. One of the most urgent issues planning and governance faces today is the country’s inability to reach collective understanding, never mind a collective vision, for how to remedy residential segregation and undo what has been methodically done to exclude and immobilize minorities. To illustrate one aspect of this issue, the University of Washington’s Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project has uncovered and assembled an extraordinary collection of exclusionary language in deeds for homes across King County, Washington.

Researchers found a popular clause in deeds for properties across the Queen Anne Neighborhood of Seattle that read, “no person or persons of Asiatic, African or Negro blood, lineage, or extraction shall be permitted to occupy a portion of said property.”1 For Lake Alice properties in the City of Snoqualmie, WA, another restriction asserted, “neither the owner or any successor in interest shall ever convey, contract to convey, lease or rent to any person other than the white or caucasian races, said premises or any portion thereof or permit the occupancy thereof by any such persons, except as a domestic servant.”2 Centuries of unconstitutional practices are responsible for the precarious trajectory that facilitated unfair treatment of minorities, especially based on race and African lineage. What may sometimes seem like a distant past of slavery, Jim Crow laws, or the struggle to reach the Civil Rights Act of 1964, remains relevant today; deep-seated bias continues to manifest in new ways as de facto exclusions. As a result of this complex history, the contemporary world must continue to grapple with the innumerous social, economic, and political issues that challenge society. With its many facets, the crippling conditions of residential segregation have led to a perpetual state of inequality and social immobility throughout American cities, reinforced and often defined by disproportionate rates of poverty, literacy, homicide, and incarceration. Unfortunately, a national approach to inclusive and integrated housing has neither been successfully implemented nor enforced on a widespread scale. An inclusive and integrated future remains to be seen but relies heavily on a variety of actors committed to the optimistic vectors that aim for equality and the unfulfilled potential of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Contextualizing Contemporary Challenges for Planning & Design In its larger historical-geographic and political-economic context, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was a victory for the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, outlawing discriminatory practices “in renting or buying a home, getting a mortgage, obtaining housing insurance, seeking housing assistance, or in other housing-related activities.”3 However, enacting the law changed very little about deeper and more complex disparities, in a country perhaps haunted by its violent past and the manipulative normalization of enslaving, stigmatizing, marginalizing, and lynching African Americans. The beginning of what helped construct one of the modern world’s most challenging barriers to overcome was catalyzed in the sixteenth century by the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Relentless cycles of slavery persisted for generations, and its complete normalization within society rendered it as no cause for concern of the time. America’s European-inspired colonial tactics of enslaving indigenous populations helped define the power dynamic between the self-proclaimed, superior white man and his inferior black slave(s). By 1863, President Abraham Lincoln legally abolished slavery by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed over 3.5 million previously-enslaved African

Americans. However, the Great Migration northward, with eyes set on a promising future in industrializing cities—such as Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Cleveland, Dayton, Detroit, and Chicago—stoked widespread opposition to the notion of equality.

This reactionary disinterest would then unapologetically position itself as the primary ingredient for effectively excluding black men and women from participating in a rather homogeneous and conditional white America. This America was infuriated by the proposition of sharing spaces or places. The daunting task of overcoming this, slowly, indefinitely, and not without painful sacrifice, kept America’s black population within a tight and uncomfortable margin of society. According to Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 African Americans were lynched. Often unfolding as public spectacles, this horrific and normalized method of public humiliation, followed by senseless killing by hanging, not only disturbingly fulfilled deep-seated hate but also terrorized black communities, contributing to continued isolation and intimidation.4 If the country intended to progress to any degree, the reality of its indifferent, intolerant, and violent past—precisely in terms of white citizens excluding, blaming, ridiculing, humiliating, attacking, and murdering black citizens—could not be dismissed as an irrelevant or disconnected history. Within this context, housing situates itself at the center of the continued struggle for equality. In 1962, following in the footsteps of Lincoln’s emancipatory actions and aspirations, President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order that intended to prohibit federal agencies from financing residential segregation.5 And in 1966, roughly three years after JFK’s assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s attempt to enact a housing discrimination bill was rejected by the Senate.6 It took another national tragedy on April 4, 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., to pass a federal law that addressed residential segregation. The Fair Housing Act was enacted a week following MLK’s assassination. Known for his remarkable leadership during the Civil Rights Movement, MLK’s sudden death put pressure on Washington to pass the bill that some had previously been “violently opposed to.”7 1968 was a pivotal year along a charged vector of the civil rights struggle, with momentum for demanding equal rights and fair opportunities for all. By looking back to reflect on these many elements of the past and their implications on society, it is apparent that the lives of Abraham Lincoln (d.1865), John F. Kennedy (d.1963), and Martin Luther King Jr. (d.1968) represent ambitious national leadership that at least contributed to teaching the world an important lesson; in the face of injustice or inequality, one must stand up and speak out for what is right. By trusting one’s own human instinct, aware of the potential consequences, the reward for countless others will be far greater than any personal risks initially faced or pain subsequently endured. Lincoln, Kennedy, and Dr. King provided a constructive and inspiring service to both a human and urban project. As opposed to America’s trend of separation, homogeneity, and exclusion, this project was interested in collaboration, diversity, and inclusion. Although their optimistic approach to meaningful leadership was abruptly ended by assassination, they are often remembered for these contributions to society. Careers of publicly challenging and denouncing institutional mechanisms that reinforced exclusion and division revealed an empowering facet of larger sociocultural and political transitions in the country. The capacity to realize more equitable social arrangements was supported by persistent advocacy, inspiration, and hope for an imperfect society that could someday revel in its diversity and complexity.

4. Compiled data of total lynchings between 1882 and 1968, accessed 17 November 2018, http://archive.tuskegee.edu/archive/bitstream/handle/123456789/511/Lyching%201882%201968.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

1. “Racial Restrictive Covenants: Neighborhood by neighborhood restrictions across King County,” accessed 2 December 2018, http://depts. washington.edu/civilr/covenants.htm.

5. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a Division of W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, 177.

2. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

3. “Fair Housing is Your Right,” accessed 2 December 2018, https://www. hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp.

7. “The Fair Housing Act of 1968,” accessed 4 December 2018, https:// history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlight/Detail/15032451325?ret=True.

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Figure 1. “A Taxonomy of Transitions,� United States Census Data shows how segregation persists in Chicago, Illinois in the year 2000, map created by Bill Rankin, Yale University, 2009, accessed 22 November 2018, http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots.

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Relevance of Inclusive & Integrated Trajectories In the context of Triangular Trade, centuries of slavery, the American Civil War, Jim Crow laws, and the Civil Rights Movement, it is imperative not to forget the events that led up to the Fair Housing Act of 1968. In the lauded New York Times Bestseller, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein asserts, “where other civil rights laws have fallen short, the failures [of the Fair Housing Act] have been in implementation and enforcement, not in concept.”8 Rothstein’s formulation of the contemporary issue of residential segregation also highlights that the federal government “continues to promote it implicitly, every year making remedial action more difficult,” e.g. supplying low-income families with housing vouchers to rent in other minority areas or incentivizing low-income housing developers with federal tax credits to build more units in segregated neighborhoods.9,10 From this perspective, the challenge does not ask of us to wait and see whether or not inclusive laws lead to the endless conduits of opportunity and equality; rather, it presents the daunting and arduous task of undoing what has been embedded into the DNA of centuries of decision making that has shaped and continues to shape the nation’s laws, institutions, and anxiety-riddled psyche.

The contemporary dynamics of perpetual residential segregation present a complex entanglement of quantifiable forces that should inspire designers, planners, policymakers, and elected officials to advocate for and commit to equitable paths forward. And beyond the FHA’s failure to effectively implement and enforce policies, including related statutes, executive orders, and regulations after 1968, effective actors must face the exacerbation of disparities intimately connected to disproportionate rates of poverty, literacy, homicide, and incarceration. These forces are primarily driven by at least three key factors: firstly, inadequate leadership from the highest levels of government that fails to provide hope for all citizens, which should transcend obvious social stratification, class and racial tensions, and partisan anecdotes that mislead their constituency; secondly, recurring police brutality, mistrust of local law enforcement, and widely-disseminated evidence that circulates through social media; and thirdly, the implicit prejudice embedded in social and political climates at nearly every imaginable scale—from the scale of one’s own home to the public and influential scale of a national stage that reverberates elements of the first key factor. During his 2016 run for president, Donald Trump attempted to speak persuasively to prospective black voters by stating, “you’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed; what the hell do you have to lose?”11 Contrary to this logic, there is plenty to lose, such as human lives and hope of any significant change.

Compared to the 86 years (1882-1968) of 3,446 lynchings throughout the country, Chicago alone accounted for a staggering 5,534 homicides in 10 years (2007-2017), 387 of which were cleared without an arrest (see Figures 2-4). It is important to understand that these homicides are overwhelmingly caused by gun violence, affecting a demographic that is young, black, and male, confined mostly to the geographies of West and South Side Chicago.12 What should shock more of the country’s leaders, lawmakers, and citizens of many communities, is the contemporary normalization of daily gun violence in highly-segregated urban areas.

There is substantial evidence and understanding of who is being disproportionately affected (young black men), how (mind-numbing and normalized violence), when (daily), and why (stark segregation that

8. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a Division of W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, 178.

9. Ibid., 180.

10. “Low-Income Housing Tax Credits,” 2018 June 6, https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/lihtc.html.

underpins a complex system improperly configured to account for the well-being of all its citizens). The failure to pursue a comprehensive approach to inclusive and integrated housing models, systematically adopted on a widespread scale, will only pour fuel on a fire that has been relentlessly burning for over 500 years. If the concept of an inclusive and integrated society sounds like an inviting gesture and maybe even obvious vector to take, why is it that the country continues to struggle with centuries-old race relations? What is actually preventing the implementation and enforcement of an increasingly-equal landscape and perhaps productive socio-cultural common ground?

The Task of Realizing Fair Housing’s Unfulfilled Potential Insight and inspiration for de facto steps forward can be gained by reexamining the initial intentions and aspirations of the Fair Housing Act. Facing a variety of contemporary urban conditions and challenges, the Housing Act’s unfulfilled potential rests quietly like a dormant volcano, awaiting widespread impact to deliver its promise of “fair housing.” This unfulfilled potential goes beyond just outlawing discriminatory practices of renting or buying homes. The inclusive and integrated road not taken could involve widespread adoption of experimental housing models, beyond the rumored success of mixed-income housing developments.13 As one possibility today, the notion of managing gentrification without displacement presents a variety of opportunities and challenges but requires much deeper thought than this paper can offer. In the recent publication, A Shared Future: Fostering Communities of Inclusion in an Era of Inequality, the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University suggests that there are combinations of top-down and bottomup strategies to help successfully produce inclusive and integrated communities. Entirely new or adapted ways of thinking through design and planning could also generate exciting new proposals, supported by an optimistic approach and conscious effort to inspire evolving proximities and relationships among diverse ethnographic, empathic, and political-economic dimensions not otherwise related or incentivized to amalgamate. The road not taken is concerned with achieving equal access to opportunity, not to be confused with an agenda advocating for some radically-neutralized or deprived, cultural homogeneity. In this context, “equal access” means not excluded, and “opportunity” can be defined as the perception of possibilities and ability to achieve one’s goals, regardless of demography, geography, or household income.

In an inclusive and integrated society, the ability for a child to perceive opportunity is not severely hindered by the neighborhood in which they grow up in. With little doubt, a child born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts can dream without limitations or boundaries as they walk through Harvard Yard with profound interest: an early impression of busy college students and professors crisscrossing through the yard.

The exposure and proximity to opportunity and ability to observe what is can inspire thoughts for what can be. And across the elevated rails and Dan Ryan Expressway, a child in South Side Chicago’s Englewood Neighborhood can effortlessly gaze to the east from their bedroom window, contemplating a future at the University of Chicago. However, in an inclusive and integrated society, change does not require an explosive, bottom-up catalyst that declares “revolution!” or insists on overthrowing the government; the government should play an integral role in the success of the system. This certainly does not require all citizens to opt into some restrictive national program that demands living in total peace and harmony, collectively organizing and controlling all means of production. Instead, a more appropriate and feasible approach would be to reform critical aspects of an existing political-economic system by recalibrating or reverse-engineering portions of it, with the explicit intent of producing more equitable outcomes. But in the path of any ambitious goal wishing to tinker with society arises the barriers and risks of such a pursuit.

The road to inclusive and integrated housing faces several hurdles: grappling with stigma and scapegoating that perpetuates false narratives about race, class, and crime; questioning feelings of resentment driven by misunderstanding; overcoming the fear of complexity, in design,

11. “Trump pitches black voters: ‘What the hell do you have to lose?,’” https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/19/politics/donald-trump-african-american-voters/index.html.

12. “In Chicago, 552 people have been killed this year. That is 93 fewer than 2017,” https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicago-homicides-data-tracker-htmlstory.html.

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13.” The Problem with Mixed-Income Housing,” 21 May 2014, accessed 4 December 2018, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/the-problemwith-mixed-income-housing/.

Figure 2. Low-arrest rates across highly-segregated West and South Side Chicago. The Washington Post, accessed 20 November 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/investigations/unsolved-homicide-database/?utm_term=.13f756c00692&city=chicago.

Figure 3. Arrest rates falling well short of average. The Washington Post, accessed 20 November 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ graphics/2018/investigations/unsolved-homicide-database/?utm_term=.13f756c00692&city=chicago.

Figure 4. Arrests involving white victims stand out in relation to arrests involving black victims. The Washington Post, accessed 20 November 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/investigations/unsolved-homicide-database/?utm_term=.13f756c00692&city=chicago.

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planning, and politics; and challenging indifference. Thoughts of the widespread adoption of inclusive and integrated housing also risks inciting extreme opposition across the political spectrum, from far-right to far-left. In the realm of extreme opposition to anything inclusive, integrated, or diverse, Kathleen Belew’s writing on the inner-workings of white supremacy is relevant, especially presented in her compelling new book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.14 Her understanding of how leaderless resistance in the United States is “motivated and propelled by a world view and by a social network of like-minded people who push and enable violence” is cause for considerable concern.15 The contemporary issue of white supremacy groups cannot be dismissed in any serious conversation about a safe and equitable future. But despite the variety of probabilities that accompany potential barriers and risks, the unfulfilled potential of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 must be seriously considered.

Author: William Toohey III is an architectural designer and candidate for the post-professional Master of Architecture in Urban Design (MAUD) degree at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His research interests include urban sociology, race/ethnicity and class relations, violent crime, housing, equity, social mobility, and public policy.

Conclusion If a national approach to inclusive and integrated housing can be successfully implemented on a widespread scale, an equal and fair landscape for housing will define the future of American cities. In its efforts, the ambitious combination of bottom-up and top-down strategies need to reconcile the variety of factors contributing to housing disparities.

Thorough analysis and remedial action must properly address the forces that enable the disproportionate onslaught on education, labor, and health, compounded by homicide rates and mass incarceration in highly-segregated urban areas. Often met with only temporary or reactive solutions, the issues discussed in this paper require proactive and more systematic intervention if there is any hope for de facto fair housing.

Public policy reform, combined with visionary design and planning processes, can build the momentum needed to realize the FHA’s unfulfilled potential. The agency of a contemporary urban designerplanner-policymaker collaboration can be defined by not only advocacy for equity, but also the instrumentality of helping guide regulatory frameworks that facilitate more effective ways to plan and shape the city.

And outside of urban design, planning, and policy, another aspect of this inclusive and integrated task is to intercept and diffuse toxic and misguided narratives that encourage stereotypes to propagate through the places in which we live, work, learn, play, shop, travel, mingle, etc.

At catastrophic rates, beyond the immediate impact of great design and planning of new housing configurations, hate and bigotry runs rampant through the myriad scales of our built environment. Any attempts to listen to or learn from each other could award increasing commonality and enjoyment of the qualities and phenomena of the human condition, rather than perpetuate the chaos and bitterness widely broadcasted through the screens and speakers we have armed ourselves with. But this requires swift and committed action, from the individual to the collective, to step forward into both material and immaterial territories that challenge our own preconceived notions of the world around us. This might lead to feelings of uncertainty due mostly to unfamiliarity, but it permits an unprecedented, collective imagination and collaboration that clears the way to the dormant road not taken. The success of this necessary but not inevitable endeavor will be critically appraised by the degree to which an extraordinary individual and collective effort is made to ensure a productive, safe, just, inclusive, and integrated society—a future where more of the population has reasons to collectively sustain and enjoy itself than escape or muddle through.

14. Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, Harvard University Press, Spring 2018. See additional research at https://www.kathleenbelew.com/.

15. “Documenting Hate: New American Nazis,” Season 36 Episode 17, 54m 18s, Frontline, https://www.pbs.org/video/documenting-hate-new-american-nazis-vrbezk/?fbclid=IwAR0BcJnZu3-iB7n5xUV8-O5HfE0yTRm7JzEs17G0jRBvfRJdrMQZyJWyonA. 10

Cover Image: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act as Martin Luther King, Jr. and others look on, photo by Cecil Stoughton, White House Press Office (WHPO), accessed 27 November 2018, https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lyndon_Johnson_signing_Civil_Rights_Act,_July_2,_1964.jpg.

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