As reauthorization of the federal HOPE VI program garners attention from Congress, affordable housing and fair housing advocates have resurrected a broader ongoing debate. Arguments about where the program’s newly rebuilt public housing units should, can and may be placed derive from a variety of civil rights, strategic, constitutional, racist, historical, self-interested and political motivations. Affordable housing and community development advocates seek onsite- or neighborhood-only placement, a position that attempts to address issues associated with gentrifying neighborhoods. Simultaneously, fair housing and civil rights advocates argue for a national policy that takes respective local contexts into consideration and allows for placement of some of the new units in areas outside of where People of Color have been historically segregated and contained by white racist power structures.

The recent history of how the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and local public housing authorities (PHAs) have carried out the HOPE VI program is not, on the whole, positive. It is settled among most advocates that “demolition only” activities, without the rebuilding of replacement units, have harmed residents, future residents and neighborhoods in tremendous ways. The harm brought by PHA practices that have disallowed resident participation, lost track of temporarily displaced residents and disallowed them from returning to replacement units cannot be understated. However, the issue of siting shapes the HOPE VI current debate.

During the 1930s, when much of today’s public housing was first built, the reprehensible realities of this country’s documented history of racism controlled every aspect of African Americans’ and other racial and ethnic minorities’ lives; the building of public housing was no exception. Cities and public housing authorities across America used federal monies to house their poor. But while carrying out this facially noble stewardship, the white powers-that-be remained conscious of their white citizens’ interests and the necessary planning ingredients needed to attract new business to their respective cities. Their answer was easy, contain Negro public housing residents to isolated parts of town. While white public housing residents were less isolated, Negro public housing “conveniently” stood in areas that made it easy to withhold city services and ignore development of infrastructure and toxins from nearby environmental hazards. Litigation in a few of these cities has helped eradicate some of these oppressive conditions.

This same litigation (brought on behalf of residents and those on public housing waiting lists) allowed families, who desperately sought relief from oppressive conditions, the protection of their children from deadly neighborhood crime and the aid of better performing schools, to choose to break free of these containment facilities and move to other areas of their regions. This type of choice is the same type that some of these residents’ neighbors, affordable housing and community development advocates, now seek to withhold while arguing for onsite- or neighborhood-only HOPE VI replacement.

Although HOPE VI is a relatively new program, public debate about the placement of public housing has existed at least since 1949—well before the passage of the Fair Housing Act, which requires governmental agencies to administer housing programs in ways that affirmatively furthers fair housing. It was then that Representative Vito Marcantonio took to the congressional floor in support of his amendment to prohibit the use of federal funds that permitted housing segregation. Profoundly, he challenged those who were in favor of affordable housing but fearful of supporting his anti-segregation amendment because, strategically, it would kill the needed support for housing funds. His words ring today as relevant as they did then:

“. . . you have no right to use housing against civil rights. Housing and civil rights are an integral part of each other. Housing is advanced in the interest of the general welfare and in the interest of strengthening democracy. When you separate civil rights from housing you weaken that general welfare. You weaken the democracy that you pretend to strengthen.” Vito Marcantonio, I VOTE MY CONSCIENCE: DEBATES, SPEECHES AND WRITINGS OF VITO MARCANTONIO 307–08 (Annette T. Rubinstein and Associates ed., Vito Marcantonio Memorial 1956) (1935–50).

Many of today’s onsite-/neighborhood-only advocates contend that the anti-segregation argument serves as pretext for the clearing of historically African American neighborhoods of its affordable housing in preparation for the wholesale take over by white yuppies. However, the “silence on the segregation”/“housing today, desegregation tomorrow” strategy, has and continues to play into the hands of law makers’ interest in segregation forever.

For many, the cliché “home is where the heart is” resonates. A number of residents of distressed and disinvested areas understandably wish to remain in their neighborhoods because of the comfort of the familiar, a feeling of ownership, and/or the feeling of responsibility to remain and fight for improvements. However, everyone has not chosen to fight that particular fight, everyone has not realized their personal neighborhood investment, everyone has not found comfort amidst such external oppressive conditions, and for some the unknown is less frightening than that which is known.

To create a national policy that dictates communities in which poor People of Color must live, notwithstanding respective local and regional market considerations and their segregative histories, disregards the interests and rights of public housing residents who wish to presently live under higher opportunity conditions. To create a national onsite- or neighborhood-only policy, is to play a paternalistic role in the lives the public housing resident organizations’ voting minority, non-member residents and future residents. To create such a one size fits all national policy contributes to the maintenance of segregation and flies in the face of the Fair Housing Act and the Constitution.

Civil rights organizations, including the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, the ACLU of Maryland, the Inclusive Communities Project, and the National Fair Housing Alliance have endorsed “A Statement of Fair Housing and Civil Rights Advocates on HOPE VI Reauthorization.” The Statement sets forth ten principles that embody an anti-segregation, pro-housing choice strategy. Additional endorsements may be sent here.

By Demetria McCain, Esq., Director of Advocacy & Education, Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. Inclusive Communities Project is an affordable fair housing organization that works for the creation and maintenance of thriving racially and economically inclusive communities, expansion of fair and affordable housing opportunities for low income families, and redress for policies and practices that perpetuate the harmful effects of discrimination and segregation.