New Faces in the Neighborhood: Mediating the Forest Hills Housing Dispute
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Description
The goals are simple and easily understood: a chance for a comfortable life; a chance for as much education as you or your children are capable of absorbing; a chance for decent housing; a chance for a good job; freedom from fear and want; retirement and old age with dignity. These goals cost money—private money, public money—and the harsh truth is that there are more people who seek them than there are resources available. Some people need not concern themselves with limited resources. They have sufficient access to private wealth to allow them to pursue their goals regardless of what anyone else has or wants. Nor need they be concerned with the effects of the use of public resources because, literally or figuratively, they can simply move if any particular use threatens to interfere with the comfort of their lives. Others, most of us, do not have these options. To a greater or lesser extent, our lives are affected by the manner in which the government chooses to allocate its resources. For many, public wealth will, at least in part, be needed to get the education, the housing, and the job they want. For others, though they may be able to afford such things on their own, or with the help of only indirect public subsidies, public decisions about resource allocation will nevertheless determine the quality of their education, who lives and works next to them, how safe they feel on the streets or in public transportation, how much “disposable income” remains after taxes, and so on. Wealthy as the United States may be, it still cannot provide each of its citizens with all of his or her needs. Perhaps that goal is impossible by definition, for as needs are filled, new ones take their place and expectations continue to rise. But the nation, without a sudden shift to strict egalitarian principles, and perhaps even with one, cannot now provide all its people with even the minimum essentials for uneventful lives. There is simply not enough to go around. So tough decisions must be made. The matter is yet more complicated. In many parts of the nation, the people most in need are racially identifiable. They are black, Hispanic, and Indian, but mainly they are black. This is historically understandable, but emotionally it leads to some predictable but devastating equations. Black equals poverty. Black equals danger. Black equals crime. In order to get a bigger piece of the economic pie, minority political groups, many of whom obtained their power through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, joined forces with the advocates of civil rights legislation that the movement produced. Also helpful was the Supreme Court's expansive reading of the Constitution's demand for “equal protection of the laws.” All of the pressure was aimed at requiring governments—local, state, and federal—to allocate more public resources in ways that would assist poor members of racial minorities. In other words, law and politics combined to favor black and Hispanic access to our (by definition) limited resources. This situation affects two broad groups of white Americans. It affects those who want but do not get government largesse because a “quota” of blacks and Hispanics do. And it affects those who make no claim to the public funds, but whose lives are “upset” in some other way because of the manner in which the minorities make use of the public money. The first group of whites- -those who are denied a benefit or an advantage because a minority receives it and because there is only so much to go around—sees itself victimized in various ways. Affirmative action is the most obvious and constant plaint. Minorities may get jobs, housing, or education over whites who claim to be more qualified or deserving. Whites charge this is reverse discrimination which is as evil as any other kind. Minorities respond that without some preferential treatment, at least for a while, members of their groups will not have a chance to catch up and, eventually, compete equally with the majority. The courts have responded to these disputes with a crazy quilt of rulings that cannot be easily rationalized and that depend, in part, on whether the minority is claiming its rights under the Constitution or under a statute, and whether the specific employer, landlord, or school was guilty of past discrimination. Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the University of California Medical School at Davis could constitutionally have an affirmative action program for the admission of minority group members that was based on rejecting some white applicants who were, in terms of grades at least, better qualified. The second group of whites affected by government decisions to inject substantial amounts of public funds into the private economy for the benefit of minority group members are not competing for the same public dollar. Rather, they are affected by the way such public money is spent. The most obvious examples occur in housing. Whites in neighborhood X may not be seeking government money to build themselves apartment buildings in neighborhood X; but when the government gives such money to, say, blacks for that purpose, some of the whites perceive that the comfort of their lives is jeopardized. If whites in the first group feel displaced by the government's affirmative action programs, whites in the second category feel invaded.
Source Publication
Roundtable Justice: Case Studies in Conflict Resolution: Reports to the Ford Foundation
Source Editors/Authors
Robert B. Goldmann
Publication Date
1980
Recommended Citation
Gillers, Stephen, "New Faces in the Neighborhood: Mediating the Forest Hills Housing Dispute" (1980). Faculty Chapters. 1253.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1253
