Cityscape Explores the Fair Housing Act at 50

May 2, 2019  

Cityscape Explores the Fair Housing Act at 50

The latest issue of Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research titled "The Fair Housing Act at 50" features a research symposium on fair housing and the Fair Housing Act (FHA).

Guest editors Vincent J. Reina and Susan M. Wachter introduce five articles that highlight the importance of the FHA and the challenges that still remain after its enactment. After describing the FHA's history and goal of shifting away from policies that promote segregation, they discuss how discrimination and segregation persist and impact long-term economic realities. They summarize the symposium articles, noting the findings and discussions of the studies, and how the research can contribute to improving policies that ensure that the FHA's goals are achieved.

The symposium articles present empirical findings and discuss policy implications.

Arthur Acolin, Desen Lin, and Susan M. Wachter analyze homeownership rates by race since 1970 and the persistent gap between minority and majority populations. They find that homeownership rates have remained similar to or are lower than 1970 levels for black and Hispanic households. Using data from American Housing Surveys, they identify how changes in permanent income impacts homeownership rates. Access to homeownership also influences a household's ability to accumulate wealth.

John D. Landis uses recently added Census data to analyze black-white and Hispanic-non-Hispanic residential segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas. He finds that black-white residential segregation continues to decline, but larger metropolitan areas remain more segregated than smaller ones. In contrast, Hispanic-non-Hispanic segregation is on the rise, particularly among smaller metropolitan areas.

Katherine M. O'Regan and Ken Zimmerman discuss the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule as a means to address structural inequities left untouched by the FHA. They explore how and why the rule was created, as well as its importance and limitations. They find that the rule created a new process for reshaping federal, state, and local government roles, and reworked how to address fair housing issues and allocate HUD resources.

Edward G. Goetz, Anthony Damiano, and Rashad A. Williams examine racially concentrated areas of affluence (RCAAs) in the 50 largest metropolitan areas of the U.S. They find that RCAAs are not as prevalent as racially concentrated areas of poverty, but they do contribute to public policy problems such as sprawled development and low population density. RCAAs have also been created and maintained through discriminatory land use strategies. The study argues that few policies acknowledge issues of wealth and race or emphasize reducing RCAAs.

Vincent J. Reina, Jake Wegmann, and Erick Guerra explore potential conflicts between fair housing and location affordability. Using the siting of subsidized housing across the country and in the 25 largest metropolitan areas, they find that areas with lower housing and transportation costs tend to have higher levels of minorities and more units developed using the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program.

In addition to the symposium, the issue features two refereed papers: Michael Lens, Kirk McClure, and Brent Mast's analysis of how job proximity impacts where households with people in and out of the workforce choose to locate, and Dowell Myers and JungHo Park's proposal of a new measure to estimate the growing mismatch between changes in rent and income.

Articles in this issue's regularly appearing departments include "Law as Data: Using Policy Surveillance to Advance Housing Studies" by Abraham Gutman, Katie Moran-McCabe, Adrienne Ghorashi, Andrew Campbell, and Lindsay Cloud in Data Shop; "Peas in a Pod? Comparing the U.S. and Danish Mortgage Finance Systems" by Jesper Berg, Morten Baekmand Nielsen, and James Vickery in Foreign Exchange; and "Using Heatmaps to Explore Capital Bikeshare Data" by Alexander Din in Graphic Detail.

New on HUD User