Gentrification, Displacement, and Fair Housing: Tensions and Opportunities
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Description
The Fair Housing Act’s requirement that the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administer HUD’s programs in a manner “affirmatively to further the policies” of the act, which came to be referred to as the “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH)” requirement was an unusual congressional acknowledgment that just ending discrimination is not enough. Instead, affirmative steps are necessary to undo the horrendous legacy that more than a century of policies and practices by governments, businesses, and private individuals to segregate cities, suburbs, and towns across the United States have imposed upon generations of African American and Latinx individuals. The Fair Housing Act thus mandates that the government must take affirmative measures to undo the pernicious segregation that has resulted from its past actions and thereby begin to correct the many injustices that have resulted from that segregation. Those injustices range from unequal access to good schools, job opportunities, healthy environments, and neighborhoods with low crime and other essential services and amenities to persistent (and growing) gaps between the wealth of whites and African Americans and Latinx individuals. But how exactly local governments should go about dismantling residential segregation is not a simple matter, especially in growing cities, where many formerly affordable neighborhoods that had large shares of racial or ethnic minorities in their populations are becoming gentrified. For the purposes of this chapter, I define “gentrification” as unusual increases in housing costs in low-income neighborhoods over a sustained period of time. The complexities of how to achieve fair housing as neighborhoods change have spurred decades of debate about place-based versus people-based housing assistance. The many thoughtful comments submitted during consideration of the AFFH Rule, and in the debates over regulations regarding HUD’s application of disparate impact standards and its Small Area Fair Market Rent Rule, also reveal the nuanced difficulties of the issues that fair housing goals raise. Of course, complexity can be the refuge of people who prefer the status quo or of those too timid to take a stand until all uncertainty is resolved. But even among those who earnestly want to reduce inequality and achieve diverse and thriving neighborhoods for all in their communities, the dilemmas posed by the obligation to affirmatively further fair housing in the context of gentrification make efforts to introduce effective policies fraught with dangers—of unintended consequences, legal challenges to well-intentioned judgment calls, and criticism from stakeholders who view the dilemmas differently or fail to see the nuances of the debate. This chapter seeks to make the challenges of fair housing in the context of gentrification more concrete, with the hope that getting beyond abstract arguments will help encourage more productive thinking about how local governments can reduce segregation in gentrifying neighborhoods fairly, in ways that will not result in resegregation in the years to come, and, given the limited resources that local governments have, in the most cost-efficient ways possible. To be concrete, I must ground the discussion in actual neighborhoods, and I have chosen to focus on neighborhoods in New York City because the affordable housing crisis there is especially pronounced, gentrification and fair housing debates are particularly sharp, and the city already has adopted many of the anti- displacement tools that other jurisdictions are now considering. The first section seeks to put the questions in context by providing a brief overview of the affordable housing crisis in New York City. The second section gives a summary of some of the main strategies the city has chosen to address that crisis and the opposition to those strategies that has arisen. The third section outlines the hard questions about how best to achieve fair housing in growing cities that the opposition to the city’s proposals (as well as the thoughtful comments of proponents) raises and explores some of those questions with concrete examples of how they might play out in particular neighborhoods. The chapter concludes by exploring how the assessments of fair housing required by the 2015 AFFH Rule, although now no longer required, might provide an opportunity to make progress toward resolving the difficult issues that the previous section discusses.
Source Publication
Furthering Fair Housing: Prospects for Racial Justice in America's Neighborhoods
Source Editors/Authors
Justin P. Steil, Nicholas F. Kelly, Lawrence J. Vale, Maia S. Woluchem
Publication Date
2021
Recommended Citation
Been, Vicki L., "Gentrification, Displacement, and Fair Housing: Tensions and Opportunities" (2021). Faculty Chapters. 238.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/238
