Innovative Responses to Foreclosures: Paths to Neighborhood Stability and Housing Opportunity

This Article argues that the current foreclosure crisis illustrates how economic stability and racial justice are intertwined. Recent research has found that the more racially segregated a metropolitan region is, the higher the number and rate of its foreclosures. Indeed, the high levels of racial residential segregation in the U.S. facilitated discriminatory and abusive lending practices and contributed to instability in regional housing markets. The Article contends that current fair housing laws alone are insufficient to dismantle the economic and political structures that continue to produce segregation, particularly the architecture of fragmented and unequal local governments competing with each other for resources. Responses to foreclosures provide an opportunity to chip away at these incentives for segregation by encouraging regional collaboration and shared-equity homeownership structures. Two promising examples of such collaboration are examined: first, a partnership between local governments and non-profits conducting targeted redevelopment through the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program; and, second, a joint effort by a community development financial institution and a community development corporation to buy portfolios of distressed notes at a discount in order to rehabilitate scattered-site properties as affordable housing. Building on these examples, the Article proposes that the next significant step toward creating durable solutions is for municipalities to support shared-equity homeownership structures designed to create permanent affordability and neighborhood stability. Innovative responses to foreclosures from federal, state, and local policymakers hold the promise of advancing both economic security and racial justice

Antisubordination Planning

This article proposes strengthening equity planning by incorporating an antisubordination perspective. An antisubordination approach holds that planning must directly address durable categories of social inequality. Practically, an antisubordination approach requires rigorous evaluation of the impact of proposed policies on historically oppressed groups and the adoption of policies that most ameliorate existing disparities. Recent Supreme Court decisions regarding the Fair Housing Act provide support for an antisubordination approach by recognizing the significance of implicit bias, upholding the ability to bring claims on the basis of a policy’s disparate impact, and confirming that cities can file suit to address shared harms

The Fairest of Them All: Analyzing Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Compliance

The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule requires municipalities to formulate new plans to address obstacles to fair housing and disparities in access to opportunity. Although the rule provides a more rigorous structure for plan compliance than previously, as a form of metaregulation, it still gives substantial flexibility to localities. Are municipalities creating more robust fair housing plans under the new rule, and what types of municipalities are creating more rigorous goals? Analyzing the plans filed thus far, we find that municipalities propose significantly more robust goals under the new rule than they did previously. Local capacity is positively correlated with goals containing measurable objectives or new policies. Measures of local motivation are positively associated with goals that enhance household mobility or propose place-based investments

When Prison Is the Classroom: Collaborative Learning about Urban Inequality

This article analyzes the pedagogy of an urban sociology course taught in prison, with both outside and imprisoned students. The course examined the production of knowledge used in the field of planning and sought to facilitate the coproduction of new insights about urban inequality. Participant observation, focus groups, and students’ written reflections reveal that, in comparison to traditional classroom settings, students explored with greater complexity their embodiment of multiple social identities, wrestled more deeply with the structural embeddedness of individual agency, and situated their personal experiences in a broader theoretical narrative about urban inequality. Building trust in the face of significant power disparities within the classroom was essential to learning. The findings highlight the importance of new locations of learning that enable classrooms to become contact zones, pushing students to collaboratively reimagine justice in the city with those outside the traditional classroom. Keywords: planning education; urban inequality; sociology of knowledge; prison

Limits of diversity: Jane Jacobs, the Just City, and anti-subordination

Diversity is a concept that Jane Jacobs places at the heart of her work and that Susan Fainstein similarly identifies as central to the definition of a just city. But what is the relationship between the diversity in the built environment that Jacobs emphasizes and the socio-economic diversity that Fainstein notes is so important? Drawing on Jacobs and Fainstein to analyze a case study of an affordable housing development in Boston, Massachusetts, we argue that planning with a just city in mind requires more than a commitment to diversity in urban form or demographic composition. Instead of setting out diversity as a goal that may help dominant individuals overcome irrational prejudices through the free flow of ideas when exposed to diverse peers, we argue for policies that identify and address historical inequalities and relations of domination along the lines of sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, national origin, or other ascriptive characteristics

Affordable Housing, Disasters, and Social Equity: LIHTC as a Tool for Preparedness and Recovery

Problem, research strategy, and findings: The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is the most common financing mechanism for subsidized housing production in America. We investigate how and to what extent states are currently using the LIHTC to prepare for and recover from disasters. We systematically code guidelines in the 2017 LIHTC qualified allocation plans from 53 states and territories to identify disaster-related provisions. Twenty-four states and territories include provisions for preparedness or recovery in their allocation plans, of which 13 include only preparedness provisions, 3 include only recovery provisions, and 8 include both types. Preparedness provisions address project design and siting, whereas recovery provisions direct credits to disaster-affected areas or the replacement of damaged units. Using t tests, we compare three sets of states—those without any disaster-related provisions, those with either preparedness or recovery provisions, and those with both types of provisions—across measures of housing cost, demographic composition, disaster exposure, and political ideology. States with higher homeownership rates, lower home values, and lower rents are more likely than other states to have either or both types of provisions. Future research should investigate state adoption of disaster-related LIHTC provisions to better inform affordable housing policy. Takeaway for practice: State governments could mitigate disaster-related hazards and help speed recovery by including locally relevant preparedness and recovery provisions in their LIHTC allocation plans. These provisions could encourage resilient construction, weigh the social costs and benefits of LIHTC construction in floodplains, or waive program rules to address postdisaster housing shortages

Varieties of Urbanism: A Comparative View of Inequality and the Dual Dimensions of Metropolitan Fragmentation

A large literature on urban politics documents the connection between metropolitan fragmentation and inequality. This article situates the United States comparatively to explore the structural features of local governance that underpin this connection. Examining five metropolitan areas in North America and Europe, the article identifies two distinct dimensions of fragmentation: (a) fragmentation through jurisdictional proliferation (dividing regions into increasing numbers of governments) and (b) fragmentation through resource hoarding (via exclusion, municipal parochialism, and fiscal competition). This research reveals how distinctive the United States is in the ways it combines institutional arrangements that facilitate metropolitan fragmentation (through jurisdictional proliferation) and those that reward such fragmentation (through resource-hoarding opportunities). Non-US cases furnish examples of policies that reduce jurisdictional proliferation or remove resource-hoarding opportunities. Mitigating the inequality-inducing effects of fragmentation is possible, but policies must be designed with an identification of the specific aspects of local governance structures that fuel inequality in the first place