How NYC perpetuates segregation
A newly filed federal lawsuit against the de Blasio administration on behalf of low-income New Yorkers takes aim at a problem that our city’s proud progressives rarely discuss: the fact that our seemingly diverse New York is also deeply and shamefully divided into racially segregated neighborhoods — and the billions spent on affordable housing programs powerfully contribute to the problem, in possible violation of civil rights laws.
“You can’t go 10 minutes in New York City without hearing how incredibly diverse it is. That may be true overall, but on the neighborhood level, it’s incredibly segregated,” says Craig Gurian, executive director of the Anti-Discrimination Center, a Manhattan-based civil rights organization that filed the lawsuit on behalf of three low-income New Yorkers.
The core of the problem is the way the city allocates spaces in newly built, government-subsidized housing. Affordable apartments are so scarce that the city typically fills them by lottery, and while any low- and middle-income New Yorkers can apply, a very strong preference — half the units, in most cases — goes to people who already live in the community board where the new building is located.
That’s in keeping with the fuzzy notion that low-income people from “the community” somehow deserve first crack at whatever much-needed housing gets built in their area, to the exclusion of equally needy people of literally identical income who happen to live in another part of town.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with gentrification. The inside-the-community board preference — or “outsider restriction policy,” as the lawsuit puts it — is a way of favoring one group of struggling families over others, based on nothing more than the luck of geography.
As the lawsuit points out, a group of families of identical incomes from all around the city applied for apartment in a new building at 200 E. 39th St. in Midtown East. But thanks to the 50% set-aside, applicants from Harlem, Brooklyn or Queens had a dramatically worse chance of getting into the building than people who happened to already live in Community Board 5.
“It’s clearly a violation of the Fair Housing Act and the NYC Human Rights Law. You can’t legally pander to people who are insisting on keeping a racial or ethnic status quo,” says Gurian. “We have to abandon this small little turf stuff and finally agree that all of our neighborhoods belong to all of us.”
Exactly right. Anybody who thinks the current policy has excluded them should go to antibiaslaw.com/equalaccess, which is seeking plaintiffs who might wish to join the lawsuit.
New York is an extraordinarily mobile place; we pride ourselves on the fact that 40% of the city’s population was born outside the United States. Many middle-class New Yorkers move from one neighborhood to another depending on where marriage, births, rising rents or jobs take them.
Yet when it comes to building affordable housing, the prevailing thinking suddenly turns parochial. We take it as normal that the less well-off don’t want to move outside whatever neighborhood they currently inhabit, no matter how much crime, poor transportation and failing schools that area might have. We act as if it’s fair that half or more of the affordable units of a new development — subsidized by everyone in the city — should exclude people who don’t happen to live nearby.
Excluding “outsiders” is a politically convenient arrangement that ensures black, white and Latino neighborhoods will stay as segregated as they currently are.
People in relatively segregated enclaves like Brooklyn Heights, Howard Beach and Forest Hills aren’t likely to complain about the policy, which keeps lower-income black and brown families at a distance. For their part, inner-city black and Latino politicians can embrace the policy as delivering help to needy families while keeping their political bases intact.
And the policy creates a rare moment for community boards to wield real power, which includes pretending that their somewhat arbitrary boundaries, which date back to the Lindsay administration, represent fixed and permanent communities that deserve government assistance.
Once again, this isn’t about gentrification: We’re talking about affordable units that can go only to lower- and middleclass applicants. The only question is whether the zip code of a struggling family should result in favored treatment when it comes to landing a lower-rent apartment. The unequivocal answer, according to the Fair Housing Act, is no.
“These patterns didn’t drop from the sky,” says Gurian. “The city participated in the creation of segregation; it’s obligated to now try to end that segregation.”
That assumes the city’s progressives are willing to think outside the box and make affordable housing open to all.
Local housing preferences discriminate