The One-Way Street of Integration by Edward G. Goetz

Author:Edward G. Goetz [Goetz, Edward G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Urban, Political Science, Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development, Discrimination
ISBN: 9781501716690
Google: QNY6DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-03-15T05:28:12+00:00

Dismantling Existing Communities

The final station in the spatial strategies of the fair housing movement is in many ways the most aggressive and involves the purposeful dismantling of existing communities that integrationists find to be unacceptably segregated. This strategy is carried out through mandatory desegregation orders applied to individual public housing communities, and through federal housing programs that fund the demolition of public housing and the forced displacement of the very low-income residents, predominantly people of color.

This effort to desegregate public housing communities, consistent with so many integrationist initiatives, imposes burdens on people of color that do not apply to whites. The “disestablishment” of segregation is a concept that seems to apply exclusively to communities of color. In just over twenty years of trying, more than a quarter of a million units of public housing have been demolished or otherwise removed from service.100 As with restrictions on choice described above, efforts to disestablish segregated white communities have not proceeded with anything like the speed and efficiency shown in the efforts to desegregate public housing communities. This is so despite the evidence that whites are the most highly segregated racial group in American metropolitan areas.101

It is critical to an evaluation of these efforts that in most cases the original residents of the public housing communities redeveloped have not, in fact, been desegregated. The record of those forcibly displaced by public housing redevelopment shows that most are moved to other low-income, predominantly non-white neighborhoods.102 There is, in short, little evidence that these initiatives actually work in achieving desegregation or in deconcentrating poverty, another rationale widely used to justify demolition and dispersal.

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