Tag Archives: Housing segregation
The Blogosphere Discusses Segregation in Austin
March 14, 2013 
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Over the last two months, there’s been an uptick in folks visiting the Texas Housers website after searching on terms that are some variation of “segregation in Austin.” This traffic can be traced back to a Texas Monthly article “What Nobody Says About Austin: Is Austin the state’s most segregated city?,” and a couple of […]
Read more Texas LIHTC housing program rocked by second earthquake in two months
April 22, 2012 Comments Off
Reporter Karisa King’s full Texas housing story is out in the San Antonio Express News. It is a devastating expose of the Texas Low Income Housing Tax Credit program. $9.7 billion in federal funds have been spent by the State of Texas that has on balance enhanced racial and ethnic segregation through the State’s administration […]
Read moreLow-Income Housing Program Compels Building in Poor Texas Areas – NYTimes.com
April 21, 2012 Comments Off
Karisa King of the San Antonio Epress News has an incredibly researched and very disturbing story in Sunday’s New York Times and Texas Tribune. The interactive maps are stunning at: http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/tax-credit-housing-locations/ Plans to build a low-income apartment complex for seniors in one of San Antonio’s most fashionable neighborhoods had been posted for barely a week in […]
Read more More Texas kids live in concentrated poverty than in any other state
February 23, 2012 Comments Off
What does it mean to a child to grow up in a neighborhood where poverty is concentrated? That is a question that Texas children are uniquely able to answer. More Texas children live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty that any other state – 1,120,000 Texas children according to a report issued today by the Annie […]
Read more Dallas fumbles in the absence of a housing policy
January 18, 2012 2 Comments
Housing segregation is a problem most Texas communities struggle with. Crippled by a lack of political courage and leadership no city seems to struggle more than Dallas, often with serious consequences. The Dallas Morning News (DMN) ran a front page story Sunday about a dispute between the backers of two proposed Low Income Housing Tax […]
Read more The racism of New Berlin is growing in Galveston
June 25, 2011 9 Comments
We noted yesterday the United States Department of Justice brought suit alleging the City of New Berlin, Wisconsin had violated the Fair Housing Act by denying a developer permission to build a mixed senior, family development financed with Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC). I just read the Justice Department’s compliant in the case. The same […]
Read more DOJ to Intevene in Texas Developmental Disability Segregation Case
June 23, 2011 Comments Off
According to a press release by the US Department of Justice, the Justice Department today filed papers seeking to intervene in a case filed on behalf of thousands of Texans with developmental disabilities to enforce their right under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to receive services provided by the state in the most integrated […]
Read moreBlack-White Segregation in Small and Mid-sized Texas Cities
January 24, 2011 Comments Off
I realized that my last two posts on black/white segregation in Texas focused on data from the large urban centers of the state. I don’t mean to imply this is not a statewide phenomenon. As a follow-up, I’ve pulled maps from Remapping Debate’s data tool for a couple of small and mid-sized cities in the […]
Read moreACS Segregation Data II
January 18, 2011 1 Comment
In a natural followup to yesterday’s post, Remapping Debate this morning released a look at the segregation patterns revealed by an analysis of the American Community Survey at the Census Block Group level. (A Census Block Group is smaller than a census tract and more closely represents natural neighborhood size). Highlights from their national […]
Read moreThe state of Black-White Segregation in Texas
January 17, 2011 2 Comments
Last month the Brookings Institution released a set of segregation measures about the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. This data was based on the 2005-2009 American Community Survey, the census instrument replacing the “long form” census collection. In Texas, black-white segregation declined from 2000 to 2009, as measured by the index of […]
Read moreStudy: Leading Subsidized Housing Program in Texas Limits Economic Opportunity of the Poor
December 13, 2010 1 Comment
New report finds that Low Income Housing Tax Credit housing is more likely than other rental housing to be built in low-income, predominantly minority neighborhoods. Austin, TX – The Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, the #1 producer of affordable rental housing in Texas, concentrates its new developments in low-opportunity neighborhoods, according to a […]
Read moreLawsuit alleging race discrimination in Texas housing tax credit program clears (another) hurdle
September 30, 2010 Comments Off
The Federal District Court for the Northern District of Texas has ruled that the Inclusive Communities Project has legal standing to continue its lawsuit alleging the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA) is guilty of racial discrimination in the operation of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program. Back in 2008, we discussed […]
Read moreAre Some Inclusionary Zoning Ordinances Promoting Racial Segregation?
October 27, 2009 Comments Off
Inclusionary zoning is a policy whereby a city or municipality mandates that a certain percentage of units in newly constructed multifamily developments has lower-than-market rents. This practice may also designate a proportion of newly built single family homes within subdivisions to be sold below fair market value. It would seem that by implementing these zoning […]
Read moreBlack children pay a high price for living in poverty neighborhoods
July 27, 2009 Comments Off
In the United States, living in a poor neighborhood often means living in an environment that is unhealthy and violent, and may offer relatively poor learning opportunities and economic opportunities. The troubling news from this report is that inequality in our neighborhoods may be contributing to the persistence of racial differences in economic mobility. The hopeful news is that […]
Read moreThe struggle begins to successfully design a TX Neighborhood Stabilization Program
March 5, 2009 Comments Off
I have previously expressed concerns about how the new Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) can be successfully implemented. I attended a public hearing last Friday in which officials of the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA) explained their proposed rules for how the program would be carried out. The NSP program is an attempt […]
Read moreLawsuit alleging race discrimination in Texas housing tax credit program clears hurdle
December 13, 2008 1 Comment
The Federal District Court for the Northern District of Texas has denied a motion by the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA) to throw out a lawsuit alleging the Department is guilty of racial discrimination in the operation of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program. The case will now move forward to […]
Read moreNorth Texas emerges as ground zero in newly energized fight against racial housing segregation
November 22, 2008 Comments Off
North Texas is becoming ground zero in the fight against residential racial segregation. This thanks to the experienced and increasingly aggressive advocacy of civil rights attorney Michael Daniel and Inclusive Communities Project director Betsy Julian. Consider what these two, who share offices in downtown Dallas, have done in recent weeks: Filed a federal lawsuit against […]
Read moreThe Federal Reserve presents a tale of two Texas poverty neighborhoods
November 8, 2008 1 Comment
The Community Affairs Offices of the Federal Reserve System and the Brookings Institution have issued a report, “The Enduring Challenge of Concentrated Poverty in America: Case Studies from Communities Across the U.S.” that profiles 16 high poverty communities in the US, including two in Texas. The two Texas poverty communities profiled are East Austin and […]
Read moreNew report says Dallas, Houston show increases in concentrated working poverty rates
August 16, 2008 1 Comment
According to a Brookings Institution study released this week, trends suggest that the decline in concentrated poverty that occurred during the 1990s may be reversing over the course of this decade. The report is titled, Reversal of Fortune: A New Look at Concentrated Poverty in the 2000′s and the authors are Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan […]
Read moreDallas Morning News op-ed makes economic argument against housing segregation
August 14, 2008 1 Comment
An extensive opinion piece headlined, Poor assumptions: segregating poverty in Dallas is a money-losing proposition authored by Dallas Morning News editorial writer Tod Robberson offers a carefully reasoned economic argument for tackling the racial and economic segregation I was blogging about last week. Robberson focuses on the 12 year combined efforts of fourteen North Dallas […]
Read morePart 2: 40 years after passage of the Fair Housing Act, still waiting for integrated communities
August 12, 2008 Comments Off
In the previous post I explored the debate and political process that went into the passage of the Fair Housing Act. Today, I’ll explore the political considerations that restrained the implementation on the Act and crippled our commitment as a nation to achieving the ultimate goal of residential integration. As we have already seen passage […]
Read morePart 1: 40 years after passage of the Fair Housing Act, still waiting for integrated communities
August 11, 2008 1 Comment
It is interesting and a little discouraging that on the 40th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, one of the principal goals of the Act, promoting the integration of neighborhoods remains unfulfilled and highly controversial. Today I will explore the debate and political process that went into […]
Read moreReporter alleges Section 8 tenant crime wave, but where is the evidence?
August 10, 2008 1 Comment
The elite media has decided to focus on whether Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher holders are bringing crime to suburban neighborhoods. Instead of bringing to light the millions of poor families living in deplorable conditions because they cannot afford decent housing, instead of exposing slumlord exploitation of the poor, instead of chronicling the lives of […]
Read morePoverty comes to the Texas suburbs
August 9, 2008 5 Comments
Wednesday’s blog post about the persistence of ghettos in Texas cities led me to do a little more research about the spacial dynamics of poverty in Texas urban areas. It is critical that these dynamics be considered in decisions about where to locate new subsidized housing developments. Fortunately, Texas is home of one of the […]
Read moreThe persistence of Texas ghettos is a problem for us all
August 7, 2008 1 Comment
Ghetto: a portion of a city in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure. – Merriam-Webster Dictionary Ghetto. The word makes me wince. It should be anachronistic. Yet, as much as we don’t like to hear the word, it describes the reality of the living conditions for […]
Read moreLow Income Housing Tax Credit program in Dallas frozen and challanged in lawsuit
July 22, 2008 6 Comments
The Low Income Housing Tax Credit program in Dallas has been effectively shut down for several years and is now the subject of an important civil rights lawsuit. For those who have not followed the travails of the affordable housing program in Dallas let’s review where things stand today. Anyone who has read a newspaper […]
Read moreHouston’s fair housing failure segregates Katrina evacuees in SW slum apartments
July 21, 2008 1 Comment
Today’s dangerous housing problems in the Southwestern part of Houston have been greatly exacerbated by the actions of Houston city government in the settlement of large numbers of Katrina evacuees in the area. But the problem does not lie solely in past actions. The City of Houston, in violation of provisions of the 1968 Fair […]
Read moreUnraveling the mystery of 500 unused Dallas Section 8 vouchers
July 4, 2008 15 Comments
The Dallas Morning News ran a story by Kim Horner on June 23 about 500 Section 8 vouchers that have gone unused. Since the Dallas Housing Authority (DHA) has more than 8,000 families on the waiting list and closed the waiting list for new applications four years ago I wondered what on earth was going […]
Read morePart 2: Housing segregation in Austin – a community blind to the problem
July 1, 2008 Comments Off
Watch my video blog or read the text below. Austin is a city of intense racial and economic segregation. Despite a self-image as a laid-back, tolerant contemporary community we have blinded ourselves to problems of race and poverty. Austin’s extreme residential segregation is not the result of a natural process or solely individual choices. As […]
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