PRRAC Publications & PRRAC Authors

Published in Metzger et al’s Facing Segregation: Housing Policy Solutions for a Stronger Society, Oxford University Press.

Published in Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law.

Excerpt: “Housing discrimination, program designs that entrench segregative patterns, and exclusionary zoning are significant problems that create lasting harm across generations. These issues require direct and specialized interventions. However, as the fair housing movement continues to grapple with segregation, we can benefit from efforts to broaden our advocacy work to encompass related fields. Other policies have a reciprocal effect on segregation. In addition, by working in partnership with advocates who focus on environmental justice, education, infrastructure equity, and other issues, many fair housing advocates are laying an important foundation for mutual support and for joint agendas that promote housing choice as well as other aspects of social equity.”

Introduction: “HUD has benefited enormously from strong civil rights advocacy, and many of HUD’s most important regulatory guidelines have emerged from this advocacy. We offer this selected timeline as a tribute to this ongoing history and, we hope, an inspiration to a new generation of civil rights and tenant activists.”

Published in Journal of Affordable Housing.

Excerpt: “Fair housing and environmental justice are deeply intertwined, though they have long operated in separate siloes among both policymakers and advocates. In recent years, the importance of connecting these issues has been brought home in acute ways. This included the public exposure of lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan (which gave momentum to successful efforts to raise HUD’s lead threshold), and the disastrous impacts of Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey (highlighting the need not only for emergency preparation, but also for proactive, equitable climate adaptations).”

Published in School Integration Matters: Research-Based Strategies to Advance Equity, Teachers College Press, Edited by Erica Frankenberg, Liliana M. Garces, and Megan Hopkins.

Excerpt: “Economic and racial segregation in housing fostered by federal, state, and local governments, alongside the systematic deprivation of public resources, creates areas of deep disadvantage. The relationship between segregated housing and access to an equitable educational opportunity is clear, with brain development research showing residential segregation and racial isolation can result in significant developmental impacts.”

By Philip Tegeler, Dan Rinzler, Mary Cunningham, and Craig Pollack, San Francisco Federal Reserve.

Excerpt: “Our modeling shows that housing mobility could generate significant medical cost savings from improvements in adult diabetes and extreme obesity, the vast majority of which would accrue to government health programs such as Medicaid given the low incomes of families with housing vouchers. We also conclude that it is possible that housing mobility could pay for itself, along with other legal and evaluation costs associated with PFS financing, based on medical cost saving.”

A PRRAC Policy Brief.

Excerpt: “This policy brief examines the three recent multi-billion dollar settlements reached by the U.S. government with J.P. Morgan, Citibank, and Bank of America in the context of the government’s duty, under the Fair Housing Act, to promote residential integration in its housing programs and investments. This legal duty to “affirmatively further fair housing” applies to all of the government entities involved in the bank settlements, including the Treasury Department, the Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD).”

A PRRAC Report, with the Center for Urban Research and Learning, Loyola University Chicago, & the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council.

Excerpt: “This report examines an innovative program in Milwaukee County that can help address these disparities and assist the HCVP in expanding its potential to help families and children reach higher opportunity neighborhoods. The Milwaukee County HOME Security Deposit Assistance Program (SDAP) provides families in the voucher program with a grant of up to $1,000 that can be used to pay for their security deposit, but only on housing units in suburban municipalities outside of the City of Milwaukee. These suburbs are overwhelmingly white and low-poverty (see Table 3 and Figure 1). The Milwaukee County program was originally developed to assist families facing financial barriers to moving after an unexpected loss of their current housing. But because of geographic restrictions attached to the Security Deposit (related to funding program jurisdiction), and the lack of any other significant “mobility counseling” efforts by the county PHA, the program presents an opportunity to study a particular kind of targeted intervention to facilitate moves by HCV families to lower-poverty areas and meet the goal of affirmatively furthering fair housing.”

A PRRAC Publication. Foreword by Rep. Luis Gutierrez.

Synopsis: The book is a compilation of the best and still-most-relevant articles published in Poverty & Race, the bimonthly of The Poverty & Race Research Action Council from 2006 to the present. Authors are some of the leading figures in a range of activities around these themes. It is the fourth such book PRRAC has published over the years, each with a high-visibility foreword writer: Rep. John Lewis, Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. Bill Bradley, Julian Bond in previous books, Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Chicago for this book. The chapters are organized into four sections: Race & Poverty: The Structural Underpinnings; Deconstructing Poverty and Racial Inequities; Re(emerging) Issues; Civil Rights History.

A PRRAC & Abt Associates Inc. Report.

Excerpt: “The Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is a federal program administered by the Treasury Department that subsidizes the development of rental housing projects for low-income households. LIHTC is the predominant “supply-side” or “project-based” component of U.S. rental housing policy, while the “demand-side” or “tenant-based” component is the Housing Choice Voucher program, providing subsidies that households can use to rent housing units they find in the private market. Since its creation by the Tax Reform Act of 1986, LIHTC has developed about 2.4 million units; since the early 1990s, LIHTC has been the only program that has added substantial numbers of subsidized projects to the U.S. rental housing stock. The housing voucher program currently assists about 2.5 million households—with some overlap, since vouchers frequently are used to rent units in LIHTC projects [Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy 2012]. This paper is based on the premise that an effort is needed to create a better balance between locating LIHTC projects in “high-opportunity” communities and locating them in neighborhoods where substantial numbers of poor people and minorities currently live. After examining the basis of that premise, the paper then focuses on the way in which the administrators of LIHTC—agencies of state governments—can use the systems through which they allocate tax credit authority to change the balance of LIHTC locations so that the program does a better job of helping low-income families and racial minorities live in areas with good schools, superior public services and health care, and access to jobs.”

A PRRAC-National Housing Law Project Report.

Excerpt: “It is evident that San Francisco will continue to need to be inventive and its housing advocates strong to meet the challenges ahead. Some advocates are already looking beyond the Trust Fund to the new frontier of housing policy. Building on development limitation and job-housing balance ideas from Proposition M and the phasing and linkage of different types of development demanded by the more equitable and inclusive recent redevelopment projects, they are formulating a plan to link approval of market-rate housing to meet the affordability goals set by ABAG described above. San Francisco continues to evolve its policy to fill in the gaps in its housing needs and find creative and substantial sources of funding to develop and maintain affordable housing. By also ensuring that the needs of local residents are heard, San Francisco is demonstrating that the early urban renewal and displacement days are gone and have been replaced with a vision of creating the housing, jobs and services required to maintain and rebuild vibrant, diverse and thriving communities within the City.”

By Philip Tegeler, Henry Korman, Jason Reece, and Megan Haberle.

Synopsis: This paper is intended to present a civil rights perspective on the federal policy discussion currently underway seeking to harmonize various subsidized housing development rules across the three agencies that sponsor low-income housing (HUD, the Treasury Department, and the Department of Agriculture). This “compliance harmonization” initiative has so far avoided taking on the difficult question of site selection rules in our largest low-income housing development program, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), administered by the IRS and the Treasury Department. In the discussion that follows we will suggest alternative approaches to civil rights site selection in the LIHTC program that are consistent with the statutory guidance for the program, and that also can integrate successfully with other important goals such as sustainability and transit access.

By Rolf Pendall, Elizabeth Davies, Lesley Freiman, and Rob Pitingolo.

Excerpt: “This report tracks the stubborn persistence of concentrated poverty—poverty rates over 30 percent—in U.S. metropolitan areas over a period of nearly 40 years. Neighborhoods with poverty rates above 30 percent have been recognized as places with few opportunities for employment and education, high levels of disinvestment and crime, and meager civic participation. Living in such neighborhoods over extended periods reduces the life chances of children, whether their families are poor or not. The report also looks more deeply at a subset of urban neighborhoods that can be characterized as the “original ghetto,” extensive areas whose cores were almost exclusively nonwhite and poor in 1970. The report shows that the nation continues to suffer from racially and economically divided cities, and this segregation undercuts efforts to reach important goals for health, education, employment, and civic engagement.”

By Philip Tegeler, Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, & Martha Bottia.

Excerpt: “The goals of promoting integration and avoiding racial isolation in K-12 education were recently reaffirmed as compelling government interests by five Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 (2007). That decision did strike down specific elements of voluntary plans in Seattle and Louisville; however, a majority of the Court indicated support for a wide range of race-conscious measures to promote school integration that do not assign individual students based on their race.”

By David Rusk.

Excerpt: “HUD’s new “Sustainable Communities Initiative” (SCI) represents the best of the new administration – looking forward creatively towards a new metropolitan future, and crossing bureaucratic silos to engage transportation policy, environmental policy, and housing policy in the same program. However, the SCI program also demonstrates the potential pitfalls of trying to move progressive policies without engaging the real continuing divisions of race and class in our society. We believe that the SCI program has the potential to advance the goal of racially and economically integrated and environmentally sustainable regions. However, to achieve this goal, the program needs to take these issues on explicitly.”

A PRRAC Report.

Excerpt: “Access to improved opportunities in employment, education, and even health are greatly influenced by housing location. Today, we are at a critical moment in housing mobility policy. Though more research is necessary, we now know a good deal about the benefits of mobility for families who choose to move to lower poverty, higher opportunity communities. We also know more about what is needed to make housing mobility programs work even better for families who move. This resource guide seeks to highlight some best practices for incorporating health, education, and employment supports into the voucher process to help families connect more effectively to opportunities in their new communities. It is our observation that such connections can assist families to withstand initial difficulties of a move to a new community, and remain in the community (and new school) for a long time, through high school graduation and beyond.”