In the low-income neighborhoods of many American cities, evictions are simply accepted as a part of life. However, as the New York Times recently reported (see A Sight All Too Familiar in Poor Neighborhoods, 2/28/10), a soon-to-be-published University of Wisconsin study on eviction rates and African American women in Milwaukee suggests that a focused and serious treatment of the problem is long overdue. “Just as incarceration has become typical in the lives of poor black men, eviction has become typical in the lives of poor black women,” sociologist and author of the study Matthew Desmond told the Times.

According to Desmond’s study, which analyzes eviction patterns in the private rental housing sector beginning in 2002, whereas one in 25 renter households is evicted every year in the general population in Milwaukee, the eviction rate is one in 14 in African-American neighborhoods, counting only court-ordered evictions. The study also found that women from predominantly black neighborhoods comprise 13 percent of the city’s population, yet make up 40 percent of persons evicted. The study cites to some of the obvious causes for eviction such as low wages and benefit amounts. In the Times article, Milwaukee property manager Tim Ballering asks, rhetorically, “On $673 a month, how do you buy tennis shoes for the kids, clean shirts for school and still pay your rent?” Uniquely, the study also explores rarely publicized causes of eviction well known to tenants and housing advocates. These include retaliation for reporting or complaining about poor conditions, with the study observing, interestingly, that women are more likely to make such complaints than men, and domestic violence-related evictions in which survivors get penalized (evicted) for the criminal conduct of abusive partners. Poverty and Race Research action Council’s Chester Hartman’s lament over the lack of focused studies of eviction and its causes and effects underscores the need for more studies like Desmond’s if we are ever to address effectively the disproportionate eviction burden, and consequent loss of assets and opportunity, that African-American women are bearing.

A disturbing legal precedent has developed in the 11th Circuit regarding tenants’ abilities to sue Public Housing Authorities under 42 U.S.C. 1983.  There, the Circuit Court and two District Courts have dismissed the Section 1983 claims brought by plaintiffs suing a Public Housing Authority for wrongful Section 8 terminations.  The Courts have found the Public Housing Authorities were administering a federal program, paid for by federal funds; thus, the Public Housing Authorities were not operating under “color of state law” and could not be sued under Section 1983.  For the opinions, see Shell v. U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Devel., 2009 WL 4298757 (11th Cir. Dec. 2, 2009), Shell v. U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Devel., 2008 WL 2637431 (S.D.Fla. Jul. 03, 2008), and Peete v. Palm Beach County Housing Authority, Case No. 09-82365 (S.D.Fla. Feb. 9, 2010).

By Angela Glover Blackwell

One of the visible areas of pain in this current recession has been the subprime mortgage debacle which caused a wave of foreclosures among many borrowers of color who had been unfairly targeted for high interest loans by the nation’s financial lenders. Had America paid attention to what was happening in communities of color the nation might have been spared the worst effects of an economic catastrophe that pummeled home values and sucked Americans into a vortex of foreclosures and layoffs, and stalled economic growth.  In a similar manner, the boat was missed in addressing our failing education system earlier, when test scores and dropout rates made it clear that something was going terribly wrong for many African American and Latino students.

For too long communities of color have been the canaries in the coal mine, sending out signals that should have served as urgent wake-up calls for the rest of the country.  One approach to ensuring that communities of color participate fully in the vitality of American economic life is through a focus on equity—just and fair inclusion for all.

The pursuit of equity today is different from the pursuit of equality.  While civil rights legislation established equality in principle many practical barriers remain to achieving economic and social parity.  You can’t just have the right to sit in a bus. Today, you need a bus that is frequent, connects you to employment, and provides a platform for economic, social, and physical mobility.

In many ways, inattention to equity brought about the country’s current economic mess.  The only way out is to refocus our sights on what it takes to build strong and healthy communities that enable everyone, including low-income people of color, to succeed.  To do this, the country must focus on jobs that pay family-supporting wages; high-quality education that prepares the next generation for 21st-century success; immigration and immigrant policy that fully taps the productivity and contribution of all residents; and reducing incarceration while at the same time preparing more young men for successful re-entry as productive and engaged citizens and community members. Just as essential is making sure our communities are livable, with access to healthy foods and physical activity for everyone.

Time is also running short because the demographic clock is ticking.   By sometime around 2042, the country is projected to shift from a majority white society to a “majority-minority” society with no single racial group as a majority.   Seventy-eight million baby boomers are poised to eventually retire, to be replaced by a new complement of workers reflecting the richness and diversity of America. The very future of the country will depend on how well it prepares that next generation of workers.

This is the time to reimagine the American future.  A bright future is possible if we keep in mind that diversity and equity are not the same.  Just because the country has a black president and is moving toward a more multicultural future does not mean that equity has been achieved.  At a time when everyone is hurting, communities of color are hurting even more.  High unemployment and poverty rates and growing hunger continue to define the reality for many black and Latino families.

To change that reality requires recognizing that universal strategies and policies don’t always work for everyone. For instance, the last attempt to address a financial crisis of this magnitude—the New Deal during the Great Depression—introduced many new programs but still fell short in reducing longstanding racial disparities.  Sometimes, countless seldom-seen barriers prevent communities of color from getting the help they both need and deserve.  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), touted as a cure-all, has not yet reached low-income communities of color. As we look toward 2010, we must find ways to target investment so that all will benefit.

In the end, though, racial progress is more than about policy.  The civil rights struggle became a movement when it was fueled by ordinary citizens from all walks of life.  To address today’s pressing challenges, we need a similar movement, by Americans from every corner of the nation, who recognize that the country is at a crossroads and that the future depends on a broad vision of opportunity and inclusion for all.

Angela Glover Blackwell is the founder and CEO of PolicyLink, a national research and action institute. She is the coauthor of Uncommon Common Ground: Race and America’s Future, forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Company in 2010.

By Jesus Hernandez

Abundant research exists showing how the current wave of foreclosures from unsustainable subprime mortgage products has brought a devastating loss of wealth to non-white neighborhoods across the US. Accordingly, the case against racially concentrated subprime lending should demonstrate not only how the inequitable effects of the mortgage meltdown are concentrated in non-white communities but also how these inequities remain rooted in long-standing patterns of housing discrimination that shaped segregated space – the essential condition for a racialized concentration of subprime lending to take place. Racially defined residential space should be seen as “ground-zero” for the foreclosure crisis and remains an important piece of evidence in building the case against predatory lending. The task before us is to clearly articulate how the uneven effects of subprime lending, a seemingly place-less and colorblind market phenomenon, continues the intergenerational practice of housing discrimination in the very neighborhoods initially shaped by race-based housing policies.

Here I offer two suggestions for building the fair housing case against predatory lenders and for stabilizing communities under stress. First, fair housing litigation and advocacy can benefit from contexualizing predatory lending within the historical record of racialized housing thereby linking the economic catastrophes brought on by the subprime mortgage meltdown to past episodes of racially disparate market action. Second, fair housing advocates can use this evidence to justify improvements to federal mortgage reporting requirements that can lead to more effective monitoring of financial institutions. The improved lender monitoring will aid in demonstrating how the spatially and racially concentrated loss of homeownership seen today represents a continuum of housing discrimination in segregated residential space. In turn, practical and expedited solutions for crisis relief can be targeted to those places and populations most affected by the on-going financial crisis.

Building the fair housing case against predatory lenders remains complicated by explanations that frame the cause of the mortgage meltdown as complex financial processes removed from social decisions or as irresponsible consumer action. Missing from this reasoning, of course, is acknowledging the racialized predatory lending that took place in predominantly non-white neighborhoods by subprime lenders supported by Wall Street investment. Here the significance of race-based market manipulation cannot be overstated. Holding financial institutions accountable for the social and financial damage brought by the default of rapidly unsustainable mortgages requires identifying the specific market practices that made racially segregated space vulnerable to predatory capital extraction. Connecting these historical practices to subprime lending is surprisingly very simple but because this link developed over decades of time through the formative years of the modern real estate and mortgage industry, it is easily overlooked. More often, the link is simply explained away as an epiphenomenon of competitive supply and demand markets. The link can be summarized as follows.

During the 1900s, community builders and the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) actively promulgated the use of racially restrictive covenants limiting the purchase of newly constructed homes to whites. The covenants were used as a way to create value and demand for new suburban residential developments. The NAREB also guided the development of appraisal techniques and practices that conditioned property values upon the racial characteristics of neighborhood residents. When NAREB members were appointed to draft FHA underwriting guidelines for New Deal home financing programs, racial restrictions became a formal condition of mortgage credit and fueled the formation of the homogeneous residential suburbs during the post-war housing boom.

New Deal FHA guidelines also prohibited, or “redlined,” access to credit in neighborhoods with non-white residents. The subsequent decline in redlined property values made inner-city neighborhoods vulnerable to urban redevelopment programs that assembled de-valued property for transfer to commercial developers. The forced exodus of non-white residents from redevelopment zones to areas without racially restricted covenants created new racial boundaries for residency and led to a second wave of mortgage redlining during the period 1950-1980. By this time, racialized residential boundaries were firmly embedded in the social and physical landscapes of our cities. Federal urban policy, and private implementation of said policy by the real estate industry, effectively redirected the flow of capital towards predominantly white suburban residential development. Concomitantly, these race-based market interventions shaped segregated space and created credit-starved neighborhoods now vulnerable to subprime and predatory lending.

When intensive bank deregulation shifted the risk traditionally associated with lending in segregated space to Wall Street via securitization, the rush was on. During the period 2003-2006, data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) revealed an intense concentration of unsustainable subprime loans in previously redlined areas, a market phenomenon now referred to as “reverse redlining.” To no one’s surprise, mortgage default and foreclosure rates also mirror subprime loan concentrations in redlined space. Accordingly, race remains a salient factor in understanding the current housing crisis as it played a central role in triggering the wave of foreclosures that eventually froze Wall Street credit markets.

Making the connection between financially vulnerable segregated space and today’s predatory lending practices exposes the inadequacies of federal financial monitoring policies designed to keep discriminatory mortgage lending practices in check. Lender monitoring currently takes place via the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which discourages redlining by assessing a financial institution’s record of helping to meet the credit needs of its entire community, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods; and HMDA, which mandates lenders to report data regarding loan originations, loan pricing, loan purchases, and applicant demographics. Because these monitoring practices failed to detect in advance the disparate lending practices seen today in segregated space, connecting the history of housing discrimination to the current wave of foreclosures occurring in non-white communities becomes the starting point for justifying changes to federal monitoring policy.

Housing advocates should now push for three broad changes to federal monitoring that can improve access to fair credit and fair housing. First, expand HMDA reporting requirements to keep pace with industry innovation. The list of lenders required to report should now include all financial institutions and their affiliates that generate loans for securitization and eventual sale on Wall Street. Also, expand HMDA reporting to include data on borrower interest rates, credit scores, loan reset periods, balloon payments, adjustable rate mortgage margins and indices, and loan product underwriting (e.g. stated income or low-documentation loans). These data will help identify racial and spatial concentrations of dangerous credit products that strip away home equity and cause financial instability. Simply monitoring high-cost loans as the primary indicator of predatory lending fails to capture data on important loan characteristics that help identify abusive lending practices.

Finally, housing advocates should push for transparency and enforcement of loan modification reporting requirements imposed by federal bailout programs. Loan modifications are critical to stabilizing neighborhoods experiencing stress from concentrated subprime lending and mortgage foreclosures. Proper reporting of loan modification activities remains essential to monitoring the actions of lenders and asset managers who are unwilling to move quickly to modify unsustainable loans. When used with HMDA data on subprime lending and mortgage default data, the tracking of loan modification applications and outcomes can help demonstrate disparate patterns of treatment by lenders. Thus housing advocates can gain leverage against lenders by showing how the number of approved loan modifications in segregated space fails to keep pace with their mortgage foreclosure rates thereby inhibiting federal efforts to stabilize communities in stress. Such leverage can be used to push these same lenders to remedy past practices by improving access to safe financing products designed for home buyers in crisis neighborhoods. The resulting increase in homeownership opportunities will slow the pace of investors “bottom-feeding” on repossessed homes. This will expedite the rebuilding of communities with stable families and support networks rather than encouraging investor-owned neighborhoods of unstable renters.

Keeping an innovative global credit market accountable for abusive lending practices is a process that relies upon public scrutiny for its effectiveness. Improving the data available for fair housing practitioners can be a valuable strategy in revealing disparate credit practices, advancing fair credit and fair housing enforcement, and act as a pre-emptive strike against dangerous profit-taking from financially vulnerable communities in the future. These steps will go a long way in reversing the effects of the new global financial infrastructure now operating as a Plessy-type credit market that continues to separate and divide our communities.

Jesus Hernandez is a real estate broker practicing in the Sacramento area with over 20 years of experience in residential sales and financing. His research connects the current subprime loan crisis to historical processes of mortgage redlining and residential segregation and demonstrates how racialized mortgage credit practices reproduce long-standing spatial and social patterns of inequality. He is currently completing his Ph.D in sociology at the University of California at Davis.

By Seth Wessler

The Obama administration recently announced plans to bolster it’s foreclosure prevention plan — the one that was supposed to keep millions of Americans in their homes by giving banks incentives to refinance mortgages. Until recently the Making Home Affordable plan has been a widespread failure as mortgage makers have faced no mandate to renegotiate the terms of troubled mortgages. The recent move by the administration aims to put some teeth into the program.

The impact of the failure to date is catastrophic, as millions of homeowners continue to slide into foreclosure. People of color have been hit hardest by the crisis, facing disproportionate rates of foreclosure as well as higher levels of unemployment. The recession has deepened the racial divide.

This is why it seemed odd to many when Federal Reserve Chair Ben S. Bernanke met with world bankers and collectively declared the global economy to be back on track to normal. As long as we fail to address the struggles of working people and ignore the structures of racial inequity that helped push us all into recession, we will find that a return to normal will mean very little.

Earlier this year, I traveled the country from Michigan to Arizona, Rhode Island to Washington, researching race and the recession. Near Detroit, I met Leila*, who recently lost her job as a teacher’s assistant and supports her four children alone.

She was laid off late last year because of state budget cuts. Her unemployment benefit ran out and she applied for government cash assistance. A month later, her welfare checks were also cut off and she was suddenly without any income.

Leila fell behind on her mortgage payments on the house she had just moved into. She realizes now she was sold an adjustable rate subprime loan. Her house went into foreclosure. Without any other wealth to fall back on, she’s not sure what will happen.

Because people of color were disproportionately saddled with predatory loans, neighborhoods of color bear the brunt of foreclosures. Black, Latino, Asian and American-Indian families have been stripped of much of the wealth they had carefully accumulated over the years. The impact of these losses will last for generations.

That people of color face higher rates of foreclosure is no coincidence. Until the 1970s, communities of color were broadly excluded from owning homes as a result of racial “redlining” practices and racially restrictive neighborhood agreements. Then Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) to end discrimination in lending. Suddenly redlining and racial exclusion were made illegal and people of color slowly began to access prime loans.

But in the late 1990s, Congress deregulated the mortgage industry along with Wall Street, opening the space for industry to circumvent the CRA. These were the same anti-regulatory maneuvers that made subprime securitization possible.

As the CRA was weakened and incentives to sell subprime loans grew, neighborhoods of color provided fertile ground for the sale of these faulty products. Since communities like Leila’s were largely devoid of prime lenders as a result of redlining, there was little competition and the credit vacuum created conditions for the predatory sale of high-cost loans to communities of color.

The streets of central Brooklyn and Detroit filled with predatory lenders and millions of these mortgages were sold. They ultimately burst, flooding the economy with toxic assets and submerging all of us in an economic storm.

In other words, the economic crisis is built on the country’s long history of racial discrimination.

Recovery must prevent families from suffering the recession’s worst results and lay a new foundation to avoid the kinds of unjust structures that put us all in this mess. Only by tackling racial inequity in the economy can we ensure a stable and just recovery.

An immediate halt on foreclosures is necessary, as is modernization of the Community Reinvestment Act, which would require equity in mortgage lending and expand the Act’s reach to cover new kinds of lending practices. The administration’s retooled foreclosure prevention plan is a hopeful sign but it should go further by mandating banks to renegotiate mortgages to less than 30 percent of income. Meanwhile, lawmakers should pass legislation allowing those facing foreclosure to rent their homes from the bank.

Fixing the broken healthcare system, which is responsible for more than half of personal bankruptcies and has pushed scores into foreclosure, ought to have happened months ago.

Meanwhile, unemployment continues to rise, and it’s always much higher for people of color. Stimulus job creation money and green jobs programs should be targeted to communities of color, where joblessness is literally killing people. In all this, racial impact assessments must be conducted to ensure we’re building an equitable economy.

Recovery will not mean much if we return to the “normal” economy. Let’s demand an economy that is good for all of us.

A version of this article was published on inthesetimes.com.

Seth Wessler is a Research Associate at the Applied Research Center (ARC). He is the author and principal investigator of ARC’s recent report on Race and Recession.

“Only a very small percentage of white children live in high poverty neighborhoods throughout childhood, while a majority of black children do.”  Pew Charitable Trust, Neighborhoods and the Black-White Mobility Gap (2009).

Launched in 2003, the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program was established to combat the concentration of poverty in minority communities.  The program provides current and former public housing families and families on the public housing or Housing Choice Voucher waiting lists access to private market housing in low poverty and predominantly white neighborhoods.  Program participants receive budget and financial education, at least two years of post-move counseling, and employment and transportation assistance.   To date, the program has moved 1,522 families into low-poverty, racially integrated neighborhoods.

A recent report written by Lora Engdahl and published by Poverty and Race Research Action Council and The Baltimore Regional Housing Campaign gives the program a very positive review. The report is based on the results of an ACLU of Maryland client feedback survey.  Participants reported dramatic, positive changes in their environment upon moving, significant improvement in school quality, and enhanced quality of life.

The Los Angeles Times reports today that Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers and a Los Angeles real estate mogul, has agreed to settle a housing discrimination lawsuit for $2.725 million, which he will pay into a fund for the victims of his discriminatory housing practices.  If approved, the settlement will end the case, filed three years ago by the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, based on allegations that Sterling favored Korean tenants and deliberately excluded African Americans, Hispanics, and families with children.  Sterling and his wife own and manage over 100 apartment buildings with approximately 5,000 units in Los Angeles County.

On October 21, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan announced several initiatives, including an upcoming proposed rule, to ensure in Donovan’s words that “a qualified individual and family will not be denied housing choice based on sexual orientation or gender identity.” Among other things, the proposed rule will clarify that the term “family” as used in reference to beneficiaries of the Section 8 voucher and public housing programs, includes otherwise eligible lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals and couples.

In another initiative, HUD will commission the first-ever national study of the impact of discrimination against members of the LGBT community in the rental and sale of housing. HUD compares this planned study with research it undertook in 1977, 1989 and 2000 to study the impact of housing discrimination based on race and color. See HUD’s press release on these initiatives for more details and a link to a study by Michigan’s Fair Housing Centers that found that nearly one-third of same sex couples were treated differently from different sex couples when attempting to rent or buy a place to live.

A New York Times article recently highlighted ongoing struggles to create and / or replace affordable housing in New Orleans and neighboring parishes. In both predominately white suburbs and in primarily black neighborhoods in the New Orleans city limits, proposed low- or mixed-income developments have met with staunch opposition, but the opposition has been particularly fierce in St. Bernard Parish east of the city. In September 2009 a federal district judge held the parish in contempt for violation of a consent order and a previous court order enforcing it.

The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (GNO) brought the original lawsuit, which the consent order settled. The suit challenged several ordinances enacted by the St. Bernard Parish Council. Most notable was the infamous “blood-relative” ordinance of September 2006. This ordinance would have required application for a permissive use permit to allow occupancy of any single-family residence by anyone other than a family member “within the first, second or third direct ascending or descending generation(s).” Since whites owned 93% of the houses in St. Bernard Parish before Katrina, the ordinance had glaring racial implications. The consent order, approved by the district court in February 2008, enjoined the parish from violating the Fair Housing Act and enforcing the discriminatory ordinances.

In September 2008, however, St. Bernard Parish enacted a twelve-month moratorium on multi-family development in the parish. At the time of the introduction and passage of this moratorium, a real estate developer (Provident) had begun the process of constructing four affordable housing developments in St. Bernard Parish.  GNO argued that the moratorium violated the consent order and filed a motion to enforce the order.  Judge Berrigan agreed, finding ample evidence of disparate impact, discriminatory intent, and discriminatory effect of the moratorium. In March, 2009, she enjoined enforcement of the moratorium and ordered St. Bernard Parish to rescind it. [Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center v. St. Bernard Parish, 2009 WL 2399999, E.D.La., 2009.]

The parish’s fight against the affordable housing projects continued. After the court’s March order, St. Bernard Parish denied or delayed the Provident’s applications to re-subdivide the site of the the proposed projects. In August 2009, Judge Berrigan granted GNO / Provident’s motion for contempt and, again, enforced the consent order, finding that “[t]he objections raised [to the applications for minor re-subdivision], by both the Planning Commission and the Parish Council, [were] irrelevant to the re-subdivision process and pretextual.” (2009 WL 2567186, 16, E.D.La., 2009.) Amazingly, that didn’t stop the Planning Commission from denying the application again, construing it as a “major re-subdivision.”

GNO went back to court with yet another motion for contempt and to enforce the consent order. “This is the third time that this Court is called upon to determine whether or not defendants violated orders governing this case,” Judge Berrigan said in her opinion granting the motion. She applauded the immediate and earnest recovery efforts of the parish, one of the areas hit hardest by Katrina, pointing out the incongruity between the parish’s actions to block the affordable housing development, and its otherwise valiant “spirit of recovery”:

[W]hen parish officials were initially approached by Provident, they appeared to welcome their offer of affordable housing, and for good reason. The four modestly sized housing units would bring $60 million of investment into the parish, without any cost to the parish…. Each project was estimated to produce $40,000 in annual property taxes, for a total of $160,000 a year…. Each development was mixed-income with thirty percent of the units rented at fair market rates, fifty percent at 60% of Area Median Income and twenty percent at 30% of Area Median Income. These rents were targeted to the incomes of the St. Bernard Parish workforce, such as teachers, policemen, firemen, nurses, refinery workers, dock workers, cooks, waiters, and retail sales people….

Plaintiff’s expert in affordable housing, Kalima Rose, opined
that even if St. Bernard proceeded with all the currently available federal resources and projects, including Provident, that only twenty percent of the lost rental stock would be replaced. Provident’s projects clearly promise long and short term gains for the parish.

Nevertheless, since the fall of 2008, certain St. Bernard Parish officials have repeatedly taken actions to thwart, delay and derail the proposed developments…. [Id.]

Judge Berrigan’s September order deemed the re-subdivision applications approved, and imposed monetary sanctions if the Parish fails, without good cause, to meet any of the deadlines in the opinion. The sanctions would begin at $5,000 for the first day, “increasing to $10,000 each day thereafter per each individual missed deadline…” With this latest hammer, it appears that the affordable housing project can move forward.

In Language barriers, economy may be cause for unlikely drop in Asian American homeownership (October 3, 2009) the Pasadena Star News reports on recent American Community Survey (Census Bureau) statistics that show that homeownership for Asian-Americans fell more precipitously in 2008 than for any other racial group in the U.S.. Community leaders and advocates with the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles attribute the drop to language barriers that make Asians the target of home equity and foreclosure rescue scams and lower participation in loan modification programs which, for the most part, do not include Asian language materials.

The San Francisco Chronicle provided an update in an article today on a case involving minority residents of Section 8 housing in Antioch, California, that was first written up by the Race Equity Project E-Newsletter a year ago.  The subject of E-Newsletter 3.6 was the intersection of criminal law, race, and poverty law practice.  The specific case was described in the article titled, “Targeted Enforcement of Section 8 Participants in Antioch.”  The case, brought by Bay Area Legal Aid and Public Advocates, Inc. on behalf of primarily African-American Section 8 tenants in the city of Antioch, alleged that the City’s special police enforcement division, called, the “Community Action Team” (CAT), had systematically targeted Section 8 tenants for police enforcement (“over-policing”) in an effort to drive those tenants out of Antioch and, in so doing, had violated those tenants’ civil rights.

The SF Chronicle reports that criminologist Barry Krisberg’s recent study confirmed that “Antioch’s police Community Action Team … has disproportionately concentrated on subsidized Section 8 housing for the poor, and even more so on black tenants.”

The CAT website says that the CAT’s goal is to protect the right it asserts Antioch residents have “to feel safe in their homes and neighborhoods…“  The purported right to be free from fear has yet to be codified in California law.  Based on what Social Cognition science tells us about how our mind’s implicit associations are primed to be unconsciously fearful of, especially, people of African descent by such things as watching the local evening news (see Jerry Kang’s article, “Trojan Horses of Race“), residents of Antioch, Section 8 tenants included, are likely caught in a vicious cycle of unfounded fears confirmed, in many of their minds, by the experience and reporting of targeted enforcement of low-income, African-American households.  Maybe what is needed, at least in part, is some anti-bias training for fearful residents of Antioch and its police officers in order to raise the impact of unconcious biases to the conscious level where they may be dealt with openly and Constitutionally.

On August 10, 2009, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote approved a $62.5 million settlement agreement in a landmark action brought by the Anti-Discrimination Center (ADC) against Westchester County, New York. In a legal first, the ADC sued under the federal False Claims Act to enforce the County’s obligation to “affirmatively further fair housing” as a condition of receiving Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds from the federal government. Specifically, ADC alleged that over a period of six years, the County took CDBG funds under false pretenses by certifying to HUD that it affirmatively furthered fair housing, when in fact it failed, among other things, to consider race-based impediments to housing choice and to implement measures to overcome such impediments. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, Westchester County must spend $52 million (the amount ADC alleges the County falsely obtained) to build at least 750 units of affordable housing within five years in County neighborhoods with very small African-American and Latino populations. Counsel for ADC are ADC Executive Director Craig Gurian and the law firm of Relman & Dane. For more background on the case, see Judge Cote’s opinion denying the County’s motion to dismiss the action and decision granting partial summary judgment for ADC and the August 11 New York Times article on the settlement.

The Poverty & Race Research Action Council has just published Connecting Families to Opportunity: A Resource Guide for Housing Choice Voucher Administrators. The guide surveys the best practices for supporting families that choose to move with a voucher to a higher opportunity neighborhood, stressing the importance of supportive services and systems to help families connect to the better health, education and employment opportunities such neighborhoods usually offer. One highlighted best practice is Dallas-based Inclusive Communities Project’s Mobility Assistance Program (MAP). MAP counselors encourage families to consider schools when choosing where to live arming the families with school ratings, offers school enrollment assistance, and provides support to enable enrolled children to participate in extracurricular activities. The hope is that this guide will instruct housing authorities around the country to adopt similarly supportive programs to ensure that more families will put down roots in opportunity neighborhoods to the betterment of the families’ health, well being and financial stability and success.

“The boom-and-bust cycle in the U.S. housing market over the past decade and a half has generated greater gains and larger losses for minority groups than it has for whites, according to an analysis of housing, economic and demographic data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.

From 1995 through the middle of this decade, homeownership rates rose more rapidly among all minorities than among whites. But since the start of the housing bust in 2005, rates have fallen more steeply for two of the nation’s largest minority groups — blacks and native-born Latinos — than for the rest of the population.

Overall, the ups and downs in the housing market since 1995 have reduced the homeownership gap between whites and all racial and ethnic minority groups. However, a substantial gap persists. As of 2008, 74.9% of whites owned homes, compared with 59.1% of Asians, 48.9% of Hispanics and 47.5% of blacks.”

The graph accompanying the report is illustrative of the gains and more recent decline in the rates of  homeownership among our minority and immigrant communities.  The days of unregulated subprime mortgages are hopefully gone.  However, with a future that is sure to bring about  greater regulation of the lending institutions and more restrictive lending practices, what can be done to ensure the continued growth of  the rates of homeownership within our communities.   Are there tools already out there that our communities can utilize to overcome barriers of homeownership?  Do we as advocates need to work together to create additional tools to increase homeownership?

As many in the civil rights and housing advocacy world are happily aware, on March 25, U.S. District Court Judge Helen Berrigan, struck down an ordinance passed by the St. Bernard Parish Council which placed a 12-month moratorium on housing developments of more than five units in St. Bernard Parish, New Orleans. Plaintiffs, including Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, brought action again the Council on the grounds that the moratorium violated an existing consent decree under which the Council had agreed not to engage in further violations of the federal Fair Housing Act following the Council’s adoption of a series of racially discriminatory housing ordinances. The Court found that enactment of the subject ordinance indeed violated the Fair Housing Act under both a discriminatory effect standard and discriminatory intent standard and thus violated the decree. The opinion provides a good primer on applying the Arlington Heights factors to support a finding of intentional discrimination, an unfortunately exceedingly rare occurrence. For example, the opinion noted that a proposal for mixed-income multi-family developments slated for St. Bernard Parish precipitated enactment of the moratorium. The opinion also cites to decisions that found that the terms “crime” and “blight” and concerns about personal safety due to “new” people, references made in a newspaper editorial opposing prior to imposition of the ordinance, are camoflaged racial expressions. The court relied heavily on the testimony of Dr. Calvin Bradford, housing discrimination expert, regarding the disproportionate negative impact the moratorium had on African-Americans because African-Americans in the relevant geographic area are disproportionately lower-income and disproportionately renters, and Kalima Rose, Gulf Coast region affordable housing policy expert with PolicyLink regarding, among other things, the irregularity of enacting a such a moratorium following a development application consistent with the zoning of the subject area. Relman & Dane served as lead counsel for plaintiffs and the full opinion is available on its website.

A recently published report by the Institute of Race and Poverty, Communities in Crisis:  Race and Mortgage Lending in the Twin Cities, examines the history of the home ownership in America through the lens of race and poverty.   The report substantiates that even when controlling for income and FICO scores that people of color are denied prime mortgages at much higher rates.

“The denial rate for blacks with incomes above $157,000 was 25%, while it was just 11% for Whites making less than $39,250.”

The report is  accessible despite going into  detail about the prime and sub-prime mortgage lending systems.   An interesting finding is that the growth in home ownership in communities of color started well before the emergence of sub-prime lenders in 2003, which supports that an increase in home ownership in our communities can be sustained independent of the sub-prime market.

In Upgrade the Stock of Public Housing recently posted on the Urban Institute webpage on the anticipated economic stimulus package, Margery Austin Turner counsels HUD to invest housing stimulus dollars and transfer operating subsidy commitments into communities and developments that will result in reasonably healthy neighborhoods. Austin warns that to do otherwise, that is, invest only in distressed, dysfunctional neighborhoods, “consigns another generation of kids to the danger and damage of growing up at risk.”

In Chicago, America’s most segregated big city, published December 26, 2008, Tribune reporters Azam Ahmed and Darnell Little explore the long-standing segregation between African-Americans and whites in President Elect Obama’s hometown. The article takes a historical look at housing patterns dating back to the late 19th century when blacks were confined to certain geographic areas by law. The article explains that these patterns became institutionalized and persist despite the enactment of civil rights laws not only because of ongoing albeit less overt racism, but because both African-Americans and whites tend to move to neighborhoods where they have connections and for which they feel an affinity. In terms of access to good schools and other resources and property values, these patterns put African-Americans at a distinct economic and social disadvantage. Based on the Tribune’s analysis, 84 percent of the blacks or whites would have to change neighborhoods to true achieve integration. The article is the first in a three-part series.

The final report of the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, officially released on December 9 at a press conference held in Washington D.C., is now posted on the PRRAC (Poverty & Race Research Action Council) webpage. Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act, the Commission was formed to find ways to address the presently virtually non-existent fair housing enforcement at the federal level, particularly in light of persistent racially segregated housing patterns in most U.S. cities and suburbs and ongoing housing discrimination against people of color, people with disabilities and others. The Commission is co-chaired by former HUD Secretaries Jack Kemp and Henry Cisneros. The Commission’s recommendations include creating an independent fair housing enforcement agency to replace the existing moribund structure at HUD, incorporating fair housing principles into foreclosure relief implementation (e.g., ensuring that neighborhood stabilization funds counter, rather than exacerbate racial segregation), actually ensuring compliance with the obligation of federal housing programs to “affirmatively further fair housing”, and adopting a regional approach to fair housing.

The REP recently attended the National Convening on Subprime Lending, Foreclosure and Race hosted by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. We would like to share a few resources that we picked-up with our readers.

First, the Kirwan Institute commissioned several papers on the current credit crisis These papers are available online. We found the article by Rick Cohen, A Structural Racism Lens on Subprime Foreclosures and Vacant Properties, particularly interesting.

Second, several community organizations have developed interesting and innovative responses to foreclosures in their communities. The efforts of ESOP, an Ohio-based community organization, really stood out. Since 2006, ESOP has saved over 2,500 home from foreclosure. In addition to direct action campaigns, ESOP “uses a Hot Spot Card process, through which homeowners complete documentation and provide financial information relevant to their case, and have the opportunity to make suggestions to the lender for a resolution. ESOP foreclosure prevention advocates use the information obtained from the homeowner to negotiate with the lender for an affordable modification to the loan. Unlike most housing counseling agencies, ESOP has direct points of contact and formal agreements with many lending companies, which produces results in a quick and efficient manner.” ESOP currently has working partnerships with the following lenders and servicers: Ameriquest/Argent, Charter One/CCO Mortgage, Citifinancial, Citimortgage, CitiResidential, Countrywide Home Loans, Homecomings Financial/GMAC, JP Morgan Chase, Litton Loan Servicing, Ocwen Financial Services, Option One/AHMS Inc., Select Portfolio Servicing/Fairbanks, Third Federal Savings and Loan, Wells Fargo/ASC, and Wilshire Credit Corporation.

Lastly, the Kirwan Institute will be making video recordings of the plenary sessions and transcriptions of the break-out sessions available online over the coming weeks. Take a look at their website.

Author: Mona Tawatao, Regional Counsel, Legal Services of Northern California

Earlier this month, the City of Lake Worth settled a lawsuit brought by seven Guatemalan families left homeless as the result of a night time raid in March 2006 conducted by the City’s code enforcement unit.

On the evening of March 8, 2006 members of the city’s police, fire and code enforcement departments raided two apartment buildings in one of Lake Worth’s predominantly Latino neighborhoods giving the more than 100 affected residents just 30 minutes to vacate the premises.  “[W]hile I was cooking dinner for my family. . .[a City inspector] and about 4 other men came into my apartment without my permission and looked in all the rooms and took lots of pictures,” explained plaintiff Elena Diego in a declaration filed in the case.  Diego continued, “Then, someone used a loudspeaker from a police car and told us that we had half an hour to leave our apartments . . . and that anyone who stayed after they shut off the utilities would be arrested.  They did not tell us when we would be able to move back in.”

The lawsuit, filed in December 2006, alleged that the raid was part of a pattern of “selective code enforcement” or systemic targeting of households in the City’s Latino neighborhoods and that the City’s code enforcement policies failed to provide due process and opportunity for hearing for any Lake Worth residents forced to evacuate their homes due to code enforcement action.

The Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities, Inc., based in Mebane, North Carolina, worked with the plaintiffs and their attorneys to help them establish the City’s discriminatory targeting through data analysis and mapping.

“This is an important victory for immigrant households in South Florida, particularly so for the area’s Guatemalan Mayan community.  We hope that this case sends a strong message that selective code enforcement must not be tolerated[,]” said Lisa Carmona, Senior Attorney with the Florida Equal Justice Center, one of the plaintiffs’ counsel.  See Settlement reached in 2006 Lake Worth Code Enforcement Raid,  South Florida Sun-Sentinel, September 5, 2008.

With Carmona, Tequisha Myles of the Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County; Charles Elsesser of Florida Legal Services and Peter Sleasman of Florida Institutional Legal Services served as plaintiffs’ counsel.  Please contact Lisa Carmona at lisa ‘dot’ carmona ‘at’ flajustice ‘dot’ org or Charles Elsesser at charles ‘at’ floridalegal ‘dot’ org  for additional information about the case.  For additional information about the maps created for this case, contact Allan Parnell of the Cedar Grove Institute at mcmoss ‘at’ mindspring ‘ dot’ com.  The author would like to thank Lisa Carmona for her assistance in writing this article.

Author: The Race Equity Project, Legal Services of Northern California

Several trends collided in the town of Antioch to cause a “perfect storm” threatening the civil rights of African-American participants in the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program.  Antioch, a city of about 100,000 people located in eastern Contra Costa County, and near the central valley of California, experienced rapid population growth and explosive home construction during the past several years.  As the residential real estate market severely weakened and then collapsed, Section 8 voucher holders from more expensive areas in the San Francisco bay area gravitated to Antioch because of its attractive and reasonably priced rental market.  Similar actions by private renters caused striking demographic changes, for example, in just the past five years the percentage of African-American residents of Antioch more than doubled.

By February 2006, officials in Antioch were publicly attributing perceived problems in the city to an influx of Section 8 participants. City Councilmember Jim Davis complained that Section 8 participants “seem to be a magnet for problems throughout the city of Antioch. . . . I want to see what recourse, as a city, we have to limit the numbers [of Section 8 tenants].”  Mayor Donald Freitas was quoted as saying, “If the city of Antioch has ten percent of the county population, but has (16 percent) of Section 8 housing, it is a reason for concern.”  Other city officials reported that “neighbors’ complaints have led them to believe that renters and Section 8 recipients [were] creating problems [in Antioch].”

In April 2006, Councilmember Davis called for Antioch to create its own agency to “handle complaints about Section 8 housing.”  Soon after, city officials, “police and code-enforcement personnel decided to look more closely at the number of calls for service involving . . . Section 8 housing.”  According to a report Antioch issued in November 2006, “City leaders . . . believe Antioch is home to a disproportionate number of subsidized tenants . . . [T]heir behavior patterns are disruptive; and they bring crime, drugs and disorder to the neighborhood.”

In May 2006, purportedly frustrated with nuisance allegedly caused by renters, particularly those receiving Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher benefits, certain residents of Antioch formed a group calling itself “United Citizens for Better Neighborhoods” (“UCBN”).  Its founder, Gary Gilbert, stated he was particularly incensed by low-income tenants he perceived had brought a “Ghetto attitude” to Antioch.  UCBN began demanding that Antioch somehow address the alleged problem.

In about July of 2006, and reacting to complaints of increased nuisance and criminal activity allegedly caused by the influx of Section 8 Voucher Participants to Antioch, the city and Antioch Police Department created a unit called the “Community Action Team” (“CAT”) within the police force.  Although ostensibly aimed at addressing “quality of life” issues throughout Antioch, from the outset CAT disproportionately focused, and continues to focus, on Section 8 voucher participants, and particularly on those residing in the more affluent neighborhoods of Antioch.

On receiving a complaint reporting a disturbance or nuisance in a residential neighborhood, including domestic violence related incidents, CAT would make special efforts to determine if the resident of the premises involved in the incident was a participant in the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program.  If so, the complaint of disturbance or nuisance would be forwarded to the housing authority, often with the suggestion that the participant be terminated from the Voucher Program for violating his or her tenant obligations.

Several families testified publicly about their complaints against CAT at an Antioch City Council meeting in September 2007.  After receiving numerous civil rights complaints from Section 8 participants, Bay Area Legal Aid and Public Advocates of San Francisco joined together to research these allegations.  Attorneys from the two groups obtained documents to analyze statistics, and released a report in December 2007. Data in this report showed that in 2007 the Housing Authority of the County of Contra Costa declined to seek termination of more than 60 percent of the referrals received from CAT.  Furthermore, the rate of “unfounded referrals” by CAT to the housing authority in 2006 and 2007 was significantly higher for Voucher Program participants identified as African-American.  According to housing authority data, 71.8 percent of unfounded referrals by CAT involved African-American participants, while only 17.9 percent of unfounded referrals involved White participants.

Reaction from the Antioch City Council to the report by Public Advocates and BayLegal came at a public meeting in December 2007, and was very hostile. Take a look at the 09/25/2007 and 12/18/2007 meeting videos. A subsequent attempt by the two groups to enter into a dialogue with the city was rebuffed, and in May 2008 Bay Area Legal Aid filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of several clients.  This case was expanded into a class action by an amended complaint filed in July 2008 by the Impact Fund, ACLU, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, and Public Advocates. On August 9, 2008 the New York Times profiled the case in a front page story. Antioch recently filed its answer to the complaint, and litigation is continuing.

Interested in more information? Contact David Levin, Staff Attorney, Contra Costa County Regional Office, Bay Area Legal Aid.

This post was authored by Allan M. Parnell, Ph.D., Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities.

We were asked by Reed Colfax of Relman and Dane, PLLC to determine whether there was an association between race and access to public water services in the Coal Run area in Muskingum County, Ohio. The Coal Run area is just outside of Zanesville, Ohio. In particular, Mr. Colfax was interested in having the patterns mapped. My colleagues in this analysis were Ben Marsh, Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Bucknell University, and Ann Moss Joyner, my colleague at the Cedar Grove Institute of Sustainable Communities. The results of our analysis were shown in a set of maps shown to the jury.

Census data clearly were not going to be useful because of the small size of the neighborhood. The core of the neighborhood is in two census blocks, but census data was not helpful because of the scale and distribution of residents within the blocks. Within each block, the northern part is predominantly white and the southern part is predominantly non-white. One plaintiff lived in a third census block, and the residents on the north side of Adamsville Road are in a fourth census block. There was no clear way to use Census data to show the whether race is a factor in access to public water. I proposed a house-by-house analysis within the neighborhood.

We obtained public Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data from Muskingum County. The key data were the parcel data, which identified all occupied houses in the study areas, the location of water lines with dates of construction, Zanesville’s city limits, and the street locations. Relman and Dane obtained water billing data giving the addresses of all houses with public water service. I field-checked the parcel data confirming that each property identified in the parcel data was an occupied house. We also geocoded the location of the water plant.

We knew the race of plaintiffs, but we did not know the race of the residents in the other houses. I designed a short survey asking the number of residents, the race of each resident and how long they had lived at that address. Under my supervision, two employees of Relman and Dane went door-to-door collecting the household data. The survey took place over two days. If one resident in a household was non-white, the house was coded as non-white. In the very few cases where we were unable to speak to any resident, the house was coded as unknown. Using the public GIS data, the household survey information, the plaintiff information and the addresses of houses with billed water service, Ben Marsh built the GIS layers for the maps showing the clear pattern of racial discrimination. I wrote the expert report using the maps, the survey information, and information from the plaintiffs.

Reed Colfax and John Relman decided to build the maps before the jury, layer by layer, adding information to the base map, explaining where the information in each layer came from.

Map 1 is the base map, showing the location of the Coal Run area relative to the city and the water plant and the roads.

Map 2 adds the location of public water lines as of the date when the case was filed.

Map 3 adds the location of occupied houses, showing the proximity of these houses to water lines. Note, however, that having a water line in front of your house does not necessarily mean that you have public water.

Map 4 shows which houses had billed water service. Note that one house south of the water lines had billed water service. This was an “special arrangement” made with a private line run to that house.

Map 5 introduces the race of the household with the water lines. The water line down Langen Lane clearly ends where non-white residences begin.

Map 6 adds billed water service again (the dark blue dots) confirming that most non-white houses did not have public water while most white houses did have water service.

While we believe that color schemes should be intuitively obvious (and thus white and black make sense here), it is difficult to use true black and have any internal symbol (the dark blue dot meaning billed water service) show up well. Thus, to designate houses of minority residents, a dark orange or light brown might have been more informative. Regarding the maps as shown, the attorneys chose the color scheme of the houses to indicate race.

A final map shows how far the public water lines extended. Note the location of the Coal Run area in blue.

The defense used GIS to try and make the case that race did not affect who had water service and that some areas with African American residents had water service so there was no pattern of discrimination.

The defense map pictured left shows the Coal Run area and surrounding area. Census blocks are coded by the number of African American residents. Water lines are shown in blue. The defense expert argued that all residents of a census block had water if a water line intersected any part of the block. This is demonstrably false, and he had difficulty with this argument in his testimony. The defense expert also pointed to the census block southwest of the Coal Run area that borders I-70 with 34 African American residents.

I had examined the census data for the block and found that while there were 34 African American residents in 2000, there were no African American households. Individuals in the census are classified as living either in households or in group quarters, and the African American residents all lived in group quarters. And they were all elderly. Clearly, they live in a nursing home that is 88% white. The water line in question services a health care facility that had no residents (black or white) when it was built.

This post was authored by Allan M. Parnell, Ph.D., Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities.

Webmaster’s note: Plaintiffs in this case received a near 11 million dollar jury verdict (attorneys fees reserved).

On July 10, a federal jury in Columbus, Ohio returned verdicts totaling nearly $11 million against the City of Zanesville, Muskingum County, and the East Muskingum Water Authority, for denying access to public water services on the basis of race to the African-American community of Coal Run in Ohio. Each of the 67 plaintiffs in the case, Jerry Kennedy, et al. v. City of Zanesville, Ohio, et al. Case No. 2:03-cv-01047, S.D. Ohio., testified about the hardships they endured residing in a community that has had no running water for over 50 years despite its proximity to Zanesville, a municipality of over 25,000 persons. As reported in the Time online article Making Water a Matter of Race, lead plaintiff Jerry Kennedy, a life long resident of Coal Run whose home is within yards of the municipal water line, has relied mostly on rain or hauls from the water treatment plant to his home as his water sources for most of his 58 years. Well water is not an option for Coal Run residents as the ground water has been contaminated by the surrounding coal mines. Repeated demands for water service by Kennedy and his African-American neighbors over the years went unanswered. The other plaintiffs in the case, Fair Housing Advocates Association and the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, also received favorable verdicts. Reed Colfax, John Relman, and Jennifer Klar of Washington D.C.-based civil rights firm Relman & Dane, PLLC were lead counsel in the case. Zanesville and Muskingum County plan to appeal.

For additional details on the verdicts and the case, see Relman & Dane’s press release; Racism ruled, jury finds (Columbus Dispatch); and Jury: Black Neighborhood Was Denied Water Service (truthout).

Maps created by Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities illustrating the the racial disparities in public water access between the predominantly African- American Coal Run community and the surrounding overwhelmingly white parts of the County played an instrumental role in securing the verdicts. Look for a posting on this webpage with links to those maps soon.

We all remember reading Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation, 429 U.S. 252 (1976), (“Arlington Heights I“) in law school. It stated three types of evidence that a plaintiff may use to prove racial discrimination violative of the Equal Protection Clause. Advocates, myself included, often believe that Arlington Heights I tempered the Court’s ruling in Washington v. Davis. Many believe that Arlington Heights I offers a viable method to circumvent the subjective intent requirements of the Intent Doctrine.

One year ago, a UC Davis Law student and participant in the race equity seminar, offered during the 2006 Fall semester at UC Davis Law, wrote a paper examining how courts have applied Arlington Heights I in the thirty years since that case was decided. Somewhat surprisingly, she discovered that only one case has applied the Arlington Heights factors and found evidence sufficient to support a finding of intentional discrimination. Perhaps more surprisingly, she discovered that federal courts have, by in large, failed to conduct the fact-intensive inquiries mandated by Arlington Heights I. Interested in reading her paper? Take a look.

Joining Florence Wagman Roisman’s clarion call in End Racial Segregation: Build Communities that Look Like America, recently posted on this page, two other fair housing/civil rights heavyweights urge the social justice community to fully engage in strategic race-conscious fair housing and community development advocacy as the best way to fulfill the promise of the federal Fair Housing Act, now in its 40th year.

In An Unfinished Agenda: Fair Housing and Community Development To Fight the Vestiges of Segregation, recently published in the Black Agenda Report and ShelterForce Online, renown civil rights attorney Betsy Julian calls on social justice advocates to coalesce around and move forward with an agenda that demands implementation of a true anti-segregation approach in housing and community development policy at the local, state and national levels. Like Roisman, Julian reminds us of the direct connection between government-created and sanctioned housing segregation and discrimination and the ongoing “[r]acial disparities [that] exist in almost every indicator of health and well-being.” She rightly asks whether we in the justice community are complicit in maintaining structurally racist systems when we insist on “colorblindness” and “class over race” as paradigms in approaching our work when, in fact, the demographics reveal stark differences in access to opportunity and decent living conditions between poor whites and poor people of color. Citing successful examples, she urges advocates to pursue impact litigation to address disparities in housing and municipal services and to push Congress and other law-making bodies to remove from the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, HOPE IV Public Housing Program and other programs the components that perpetuate racial segregation.

In Is local housing really fair? (April 26, Press Democrat), civil rights and land use attorney David Grabill also links racially discriminatory zoning practices to school segregation in the context of a critique of Santa Rosa, California’s “inclusionary” zoning ordinance. The ordinance, states Grabill, fails to live up to its title because it allows developers to pay fees in lieu of building affordable units in affluent high opportunity areas, thus excluding low income people who are disproportionately people of color from such neighborhoods and exporting the inclusionary obligation to poorer, mostly of color areas. Grabill offers workable local solutions such as requiring that inclusionary zoning laws apply in single-family home areas and requiring jurisdictions to match their hunger for economic development with a commitment to fairly house the workers that make such development possible.

The Harvard Law & Policy Review Online, published a note, entitled End Residential Racial Segregation: Build Communities that Look Like America, by long time housing advocate and Indiana University law professor Florence Wagman Roisman. After detailing the history of federal policies that have resegregated American cities along racial lines, the author suggests seven common sense initiatives to address the problem. We join Florence in her hope that we soon find leaders with the power, vision and courage to implement these needed changes.

The City of Baltimore filed a federal lawsuit under the Federal Fair Housing Act on January 8 alleging that defendant Wells Fargo Bank intentionally targeted Baltimore’s African-American communities for predatory loans. The complaint further alleges that Wells Fargo’s “reverse redlining” practices have led to very high rates of foreclosure in the city’s African-American and other communities of color costing the city millions in lost revenues and resulting in further distressed and destabilized neighborhoods. The complaint sets forth startling statistics, e.g. a Wells Fargo loan in a predominantly African-American community in Baltimore is four times as likely to be in foreclosure as a Wells Fargo loan in a predominantly white community, and contains several maps to illustrate such disparities, among other thing. Civil rights firm Relman & Dane is representing the city. For recent press on the lawsuit, see Baltimore Is Suing Bank Over Foreclosure Crisis (NY Times, 1/8/08) and Suspect Foreclosures (Baltimore Sun, 1/10/08) or listen to/read National Public Radio’s Morning Edition report (1/11/08) (with links to more maps) Baltimore Blames Bank for Wave of Foreclosures.

LSNC and other Legal Services corporations have been inundated with foreclosure related issues in recent months. As most poverty attorneys who have handled a foreclosure case will attest, prevention and early intervention are key to preventing foreclosure. Of course, before you can deliver education and community outreach to LSC eligible homeowners you need to know were they live. You also need to identify where populations of LSC eligible homeowners of color live. In many areas, due to the greater frequency of asset accumulation of Whites, if you do not include a separate analysis of race and ethnicity you will end up serving mostly White LSC eligible homeowners and excluding homeowners of color.

Lets conduct this analysis for Los Angeles County, California, using free online mapping software and free census data extraction tools so that any Legal Services program can replicate this process for their service area if it has a computer, Microsoft Office, and an internet connection. The online mapping software we will use is DataPlace and the free census extraction tool is GIStools. For purposes of space, this tutorial assumes that you have created an account with DataPlace and have downloaded the software and relevant datasets for GIStools.

First, we need to identify what Census data to use. Since we want to identify areas where foreclosure services outreach will have the greatest impact, we need to find the areas in Los Angeles county where there is a high percentage of homeownership and where there is a high percentage of LSC eligible clients. Since we also want to make sure that our outreach effectively reaches all LSC eligible homeowners we also want to find areas where there is a high percentage of homeowners of color and a high percentage of LSC eligible persons.

My suggestion is to use three datasets from the 2000 Census, SF3, to identify areas for possible outreach – P088 (Population by ratio of income to poverty), H007 (Tenure), and H013 (Tenure, White alone not Hispanic). Since we will be using DataPlace to map the data, we need to obtain the data at the Census Tract summary level (the smallest unit of Census geography that DataPlace can map). If I was going to map the data using ArcGIS, I would probably want to obtain the data at the Block Group summary level (the smallest unit of Census geography SF3 data is available at). Using GIStools extract the P088 and H013 data for California at the Census Tract summary level. Open the dbf. files (one for P088, one for H007, and one for H013) using Excel and copy and paste the all the data sets into one Excel spreadsheet (view example). Delete all rows for Census tracts not in Los Angeles county. You can tell which rows are for tracts in Los Angeles County by looking at the FIPSCO column. The first two numbers in the entry (“06″) represent the state code for California. The next three numbers are the FIPS codes for the various coutys in California. Los Angeles county’s FIPS code is “037.” Simply delete all rows where the value of the FIPSCO entry is not “06037″ (view example).

Second, we need to combine some of the data fields to simplify our spread sheet. Columns P088001 – 10 represent the various data fields of P088. Take a look at the Cenus Bureau’s technical documentation of the 2000 Census SF3 file to see what each of these columns represent. Since we want to know the count of person’s below 200% of the poverty level (our approximation of LSC client eligibility), we will create a new column (LSCPOP) that is the sum of P088002 – 09. The values of LSCPOP give us the count of potentially LSC services eligible persons for every Census tract in Los Angeles county (view example). Since it would also be helpful to know what percentage of the population is LSC eligible, lets create a new column (PERLSC) and use Excel to divide LSCPOP by P008001 giving use the percentage of the population that is LSC eligible for every Census tract in Los Angeles county (view example).

Columns H007001 -03 and H013001-03 represent the various data fields of H007 and H013 respectively. Take a look at the Cenus Bureau’s technical documentation of the 2000 Census SF3 file to see what each of these columns represent. We are going to use these columns to calculate the count of homeowners, the count of homeowners of color, and various percentages related to these categories.

The count of homeowners in a Census tract is simply H007002. We need to create a new column (PEROWN) to calculate the percentage of the population in each Census tract that is a homeowner. The values for this column are obtained by dividing H007002 by H007001 (view example).

The count of White homeowners is simply H013002. We need to calculate a new column (PERWHITE) to calculate the percentage of homeowners who are White in a Census tract. The values for this column are obtained by dividing H013002 by H007002 (view example).

We need to create a new column (HOCOLOR) to calculate the count of homeowners of color in a given Census tract. The values for this column are obtained by subtracting H013002 from H007002 (view example). We also need a new column (PERHOCO) to calculate the percentage of homeowners who are homeowners of color in a Census tract. The values for this column are obtained by dividing HOCOLOR by H007002 (view example).

Before we move on to step three, lets “clean up” our spread sheet by deleting columns that we no longer need. Before we do this, copy the whole spreadsheet and “Paste Spacial” it into a new spreadsheet. Paste “Values” only. Take a look at our the “cleaned up” spreadsheet showing the columns that we need to keep (view example). You should also replace all “#DIV/0!” with a null value and delete any extra sheets.

Third, we are going to identify the census tracts in Los Angeles county that will likely be the best areas to provide foreclosure related services to. We need to set the a criteria for identifying the tracts. What criteria you set is, of course, fairly subjective. When I create criteria like this I tend to select criteria that are restrictive enough to eliminate the majority of tracts but not so restrictive that I the pool of identified tracts is too small to be useful. For the purpose of this tutorial, our criteria will that tracts must have (1) 200 or more units that are owner occupied and (2) have a population that is 70% or more LSC eligible.

Create a new column (IMPACT). Using the Excel “If function” calculate whether each tract meets the criteria discussed above. Our “If Function” will read “=IF(PERLSC<.7,"",IF(H007002<200,"",1))"(view example). This formula will return a one in the IMPACT field if the tract meets our criteria and a null value if it does not.

Create a new column (RIMPACT). Using the Excel “If function” calculate whether each tract meets the criteria discussed above. Our “If Function” will read “=IF(PERLSC<.7,"",IF(H0COLOR<200,"",1))"(view example). This formula will return a one in the RIMPACT field if the tract meets our criteria and a null value if it does not.

Fourth, lets map! Save the Excel file as “Foreclosure Data.” Logon to Dataplace. Select “My Dataplace.” Select “Create New Project.” Title your project and select “Save.” Select “Upload the file from your computer.” Browse to the “Foreclosure Data” and upload it. Select “Extract Tables.” Select “Create Dataset.” Enter the required information. You may leave the default dates or enter todays date. The source of the data is “SF3 2000 Census.”Select “OK.” Select the entry “SFID.” Unselect “Indicator” and select “Part of Region.” Select “Update.” Select “Generate Indicators.” (It will take a few minutes for DataPlace to generate the indicators…be patient.) Lastly, map the indicator of your choice (IMPACT or RIMPACT) and zoom in to the appropriate level so that you can see those Census Tracts were large populations of low-income homeowners live.

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