How race and poverty intersect to prevent integration: destabilizing race as a vehicle to integrate neighborhoods.

• Author: Johnson, Alex M., Jr.
• Position: Symposium - Shaping American Communities: Segregation, Housing & the Urban Poor

INTRODUCTION

The persistence of housing segregation in the face of legal and other societal efforts to promote integration has been the subject of intense academic debate and scholarship. Most of the "early" scholarship(1) focused on the efficacy of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and subsequent amendments.(2) Much of the recent scholarship has focused on the failure of the Fair Housing Act to address the problem and the persistence of, indeed the increase in, residential segregation in the United States over the last twenty years.(3) Although there are many theories explaining the persistence of residential racial segregation in contemporary American society, there is agreement that this problem has not improved(4) since integration was adopted as a philosophy in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education.(5)

Although an exhaustive analysis of the reasons for the increase in residential segregation is outside the scope of this Article, it is beyond peradventure that racism and poverty are identified as two factors that contribute to the continuing existence of hypersegregation.(6) Hypersegregation results in the creation of ghettos(7) and other similarly designated neighborhoods in which the vast majority of urban Blacks(8) live. This Article explores the interaction between racism and poverty and the effect this interaction has on the consignment of Blacks to segregated, substandard housing. My thesis, however, differs from those traditionally presented.

In Part I, I review the traditional scholarly explanations that focus on race and poverty to explain the increase in residential segregation. Next, I disconnect race and poverty and briefly explain the role that racism plays in maintaining segregated communities. This explication is based on the assumption that in a world without racism--the ideal state of race relations in which race would be treated no differently than eye color, and neither entitlements nor rights would depend on it(9)--Blacks and whites would be proportionately represented in neighborhoods based on their socioeconomic status. Implicit in this assumption is a second assumption that Blacks would, all other things being equal, prefer to live in integrated communities with whites,(10) but are precluded from doing so because they have historically been discriminated against and subordinated in American society.(11)

Part II analyzes the deficiencies of the "traditional" legal approaches to the eradication of discrimination in housing and its byproduct, segregation. In particular, I critique two competing models--the market model and the interventionist model. Proponents argue that these models can serve as vehicles to reduce or eliminate racial discrimination in housing. The market model decries the use of intervention or legal rules to alter discriminatory behavior and assumes that a perfect market will produce a perfect world, that is, one free of inefficient discrimination.(12) Hence, the goal of market adherents is to design rules that produce a more perfect efficiency-maximizing market. To the contrary, the interventionist model assumes that discrimination will not be eradicated via market mechanisms and assumes that people adapt to legal rules and internalize them. Consequently, interventionists prescribe the adoption of antidiscrimination rules or regulations. Their goal is to create perfect default rules and regulations to combat discrimination.

Part II examines both of these models in light of the apparent failure of American society to reduce or eliminate residential housing segregation in any meaningful way. An examination of both theories reveals flaws that lessen their value as remedies for housing discrimination. Adopting a predictive or positivistic approach, I first demonstrate, as have others, that the market model may entrench rather than lessen segregation. In addition, this section reveals a paradox that explains why the market model fails to work in the discrete, fixed, one-shot transaction that is representative of the sale of a private residence, when accepted economic theory supports the contention that a seller of real property should be motivated to sell to the highest bidder, irrespective of race, if that seller is terminating her relationship with the land and the neighbors associated with it. On the contrary, the residential sale transaction should, to a degree, be viewed as a relational contract,(13) at least with respect to third-party effects. Those third-party effects cause market failure and reinforce the discriminatory animus of the residential seller.

In contrast, the major flaw in the interventionist model is exposed through an analysis of its normative base. The interventionist model presupposes that the normative base that generates the antidiscrimination message or preference is uniform and accepted. I assert to the contrary that a significant failure of the interventionist model is the articulation of a uniform message that racism is unacceptable in contemporary American society. Part II demonstrates that the interventionist model is likely to continue to fail to remediate American society's racial issues in housing and elsewhere as long as fixed racial categorizations continue to be made and enforced in American society.

Consequently, in the last section of Part II, I assume that the interventionist model is viable, but point out that it is inconsistent because American society advocates an antidiscrimination norm through laws such as the Fair Housing Act, but simultaneously promotes racial distinctiveness through such policies as the "one drop of blood rule."(14) I conclude, given the history and power of racism in the United States, that neither the antidiscrimination principle nor the adaptive preference it encourages will ever fully be internalized into society as long as the historically prevalent racial distinctiveness paradigm is also promoted as an endogenous preference.

In Part III, I apply the insights of Parts I and II to current residential housing patterns in American society to explain why segregation is increasing rather than decreasing in a society in which racism is regarded as irrational and wrongheaded. In addition, I attempt to resolve yet another well-documented paradox. Because Blacks are disproportionately represented among the poor, they should be disproportionately represented in poor communities consonant with their proportion in that population.(15) Moreover, because both poor whites and poor Blacks have limited choices in housing due to their impoverished state, one would expect them to live in the same communities. Quite the contrary, as Part III demonstrates, there is more, rather than less, segregation among the poor.

Looking at it from one perspective, in a world in which higher income means more choices, it is perhaps easier to explain why a wealthy community may be totally segregated, or all-white. For example, one could envision a scenario in which whites move out when Blacks move into the community.(16) That option is more easily available if the whites have the financial assets to relocate easily.

More realistically, another factor leading to that all-white wealthy community may be the fact that no Blacks have the requisite income to purchase housing in that neighborhood. Hence, the market may work to preclude integration. Another, more insidious factor may be that the residents of the wealthy community, who have many choices about where to live, may freely choose to situate themselves in communities in which only other whites live.(17) In a world in which the poor have fewer choices because of their necessitous economic situation, one would expect that the socioeconomic status of the poor, both white and black, would consign them to live in relatively integrated, "poor" communities in which the only defining characteristic of the inhabitants is poverty.

As Part III details, however, an examination of the data reveals that the poor are more likely to live in segregated communities than those who are economically advantaged. Indeed, it is my hypothesis that Blacks will encounter less discrimination and racism as they achieve higher degrees of economic status.(18) In this context, money or socioeconomic status has an impact on the degree of segregation experienced by Blacks. Poverty, then, serves a dual role in the maintenance of Black segregated communities. First, poverty and all that it entails(19) reinforces negative racial stereotypes of Blacks by whites and leads to efforts to exclude and separate. Second, the poverty experienced by whites causes them to value the only significant attribute they possess--the property right in their whiteness--and leads them to go to great lengths to protect this valuable asset.

Part III concludes by focusing on the intersection of race and poverty from a different perspective, a perspective that is enriched by the insights provided by recent scholarship in Critical Race Theory.(20) Part III demonstrates that the traditional analysis of the intersection of race and poverty and its impact on segregated residential housing is flawed and incomplete because it fails to properly take into account the "property" value that whites derive from maintaining their superior racial classification as whites. Much scholarship has recently been devoted to detailing the property or status value that whites obtain in maintaining a racial distinction between themselves and others.(21)

Concomitantly, what is missing in that scholarship is the role that residential segregation plays in maintaining the property or status value of superiority. Hence, Part III attempts to provide a piece that fits two different puzzles. First, I demonstrate that the value that whites derive in maintaining their whiteness is a primary factor leading to the residential segregation that is prevalent in society. Second and synergistically, that geographic separation from Blacks and others creates a...