Suburbs should plan how to encourage diversity to avoid Ferguson situation, say housing lawyers
Noting the protests and community tensions after Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, some lawyers and sociologists are urging suburban leaders to rethink how they handle diversity as their towns gain more residents of color.
“Ferguson is a cautionary tale,” Jay Readey, executive director of the Chicago Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights, told the Atlantic’s City Lab blog.
Towns that want to keep diverse communities, the article notes, are looking at how they can respond to race issues that often lead to police brutality, civil unrest and instability.
“We are at an interesting turning point in the suburbs of this country,” Readey says. “It can go one way in to a blatant racial stratification scenario, with pockets of suburban affluent and everybody else. But if we embrace the idea of a strong middle class—a multi-ethnic and multi-racial, multi-national middle—it will go another way.”
In a long Washington Post piece in September, Radley Balko examined how the suburbs like Ferguson that surround St. Louis were created by white flight, and how that racial tension affected the policies and laws of the municipalities which were formed.
“White people didn’t just flee St. Louis, they used whatever tools were at their disposal to prevent black people from joining them, including race-restrictive deeds and covenants until they were struck down in 1947, segregation until it was struck down in 1954, real estate pacts, and finally zoning laws,” Balko wrote. “As the courts struck down the more blatant discriminatory policies like restrictive covenants and explicit segregation, whites engaged in what you might call a pattern of zone and retreat. … As black families moved out from the city and slowly infiltrated white towns, new white developments would spring up further out still, incorporate, and zone to keep the black population at bay. Blacks would move in to those towns too, and the process would repeat itself.”
After World War II, CityLab notes, many American suburbs were predominantly white and middle class. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Jones v. Mayer in 1967 prohibiting racial discrimination in real estate transactions, more black families began moving out of the cities and into the suburbs, Balko wrote.
CityLab notes that this migration increased in the 1990s and 2000s, when federal and state policies encouraged home ownership for more American families. The encouragement included incentives for lower-income buyers and their mortgage lenders, writes the CityLab article’s author, Amy Stuart Wells. She’s a sociology and education professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College.
She also mentions Clinton and Bush administration policies that supported tax-abated luxury condo construction in cities. The structures attracted “more affluent whites,” she writes, who “moved back to the same cities their parents and grandparents fled 60 years ago.” Neighborhoods started to become gentrified, pushing poorer residents out. Some then moved to what the CityLab article calls “inner ring suburbs.”
“Ironically, these inner ring suburbs, once considered ‘white flight’ communities, are now more reflective of the country’s demographics than the cities are,” Paul Scully, executive director of Building One America, told CityLab.
The CityLab article says that the Obama administration has been more proactive in enforcing laws that prevent housing discrimination. Wells mentions a 2009 Westchester County fair-housing case. In 2013, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development withdrew $7.4 million in grants for the suburban New York county, after it found that the municipality was not complying with an order to build more mixed-income housing in wealthy neighborhoods.
The article also mentions suburban towns that have historically made efforts towards planning for diversity, including the Chicago suburb Oak Park; Shaker Heights, Ohio, which borders Cleveland; and Maplewood-South Orange, near Newark, New Jersey. As more blacks and Hispanic families moved to the towns, Wells writes, housing groups worked with area real estate agents to keep white flight at a minimum.
“We don’t talk so much about neighborhood integration anymore, we talk about stabilization and revitalization,” Lisa Gold-Scott, a housing attorney for Shaker Heights, told the Atlantic.
She notes the importance of having safe places to live, and successful business districts. The list of issues CityLab says suburbs should address include “racial profiling, equal access to infrastructure, economic revitalization, and school reform.”
“It is a never-ending process,” Gold-Scott says, “and you can’t just rest on your laurels.”
