EXCLUSIONARY, LOW OPPORTUNITY
Ex: working-class majority-white suburbs, more rural majority-white areas or small towns with declining populations or few amenities
Exclusionary, low-opportunity communities were often exclusionary and high-opportunity at some point, but either a general decline in economic fortunes of the surrounding city or a flight of better-off households and jobs to a newer or more desirable neighborhood impacted residents’ ability to thrive. It would not be surprising if, despite having lower levels of opportunity than before, these communities remain a relative bastion of resources compared to others surrounding them. It would also not be surprising if the community was less rigidly segregated than exclusionary, high-opportunity neighborhoods, but remained segregated to some degree by race, class, or both.
In exclusionary, low-opportunity communities, redress advocates should prioritize policies and programs that remove barriers to entry, stabilize families, regulate slumlords, and catalyze investments, such as:
True community land trusts (CLTs) are community-controlled, affordable housing developers that ensure all the housing they build is affordable forever. CLTs have a tripartite non-profit board structure with all board members elected by the membership: one-third from people who live in housing built by the CLT, one-third from people who live in the surrounding neighborhood, and one-third from the public. CLTs provide all types of housing, from rentals and coops, to condos and single-family for-sale units. CLTs can be especially effective if they’re still able to purchase land at reasonable prices. They also have a better track record of helping homeowners weather foreclosure crises. These features may make them a good fit for exclusionary, low opportunity areas.
Grounded Solutions Network: Community Land Trusts
Finding developable land can be one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome when trying to create affordable housing in exclusionary communities. Local governments can bypass this barrier by dedicating publicly owned land to affordable housing and pairing it with development subsidies. This can include surface parking lots, unused school buildings, tax-adjudicated property, or land owned by redevelopment or public housing authorities.
Local Housing Solutions: Use of publicly owned property for affordable housing
Especially in areas where disinvestment is accelerating, it’s important for local governments to create a buffer against more rapid decline by clearing vacant lots and demolishing dangerous vacant structures. Badly maintained blighted properties often have a disparate impact on Black and Brown communities.
America's criminal legal system has a disparate impact on Black and Brown people at every step in the process. The result is that criminal background screening in rental housing often operates as a proxy for racial discrimination. Fair chance in housing policies are designed to offer people with criminal records a fair chance at a place to call home while simultaneously reducing homelessness and recidivism.
Vera Institute of Justice: Opening Doors Initiative
National Housing Law Project: Fair Chance Ordinances, An Advocate’s Toolkit
An ideal healthy homes programs would require landlords to register their rental properties with the local government, set a basic standard of health and safety for all rental units, ensure all rental units are inspected at least every three years, offer assistance to cooperative small landlords to make repairs in exchange for holding their units affordable for a period of time, protect renters against retaliation when they request repairs, and put funds or policies in place to ensure renters have resources or a place to go if their unit is found to be uninhabitable. Substandard rental housing disproportionately impacts Black and Brown renters in areas facing disinvestment. It also impacts neighboring homeowners in these majority-people of color areas because living next to badly maintained apartments drives down property values.
ChangeLab Solutions: A Guide to Proactive Rental Inspections
Some of the most important ways to remove barriers to entry to exclusive communities are HCV mobility programs. Typically, successful programs include at least three elements, in addition to a Source of Income anti-discrimination law, also described in this list. Those three elements are Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMR) or Exception Payment Standards, landlord incentives, and mobility counseling. Housing authorities, which administer the HCV program, can use SAFMR or Exception Payment Standards to set the amount a voucher will pay a landlord based on the average rents in the zip code, rather than the metro area. This ensures that in areas with higher rents, a voucher will have a better chance of being able to actually cover that rent. Research shows that landlord incentives, like lease-up bonuses paid by the housing authority to the landlord when a family with a voucher signs a lease in a high-opportunity neighborhood, prove very successful in ensuring voucher holders can access these areas. Mobility counseling programs, often run by the housing authority or a nonprofit contractor, provide case management to families with vouchers looking to move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. They can include assistance with finding landlords who will accept vouchers, scouting new schools in different neighborhoods, planning out public transportation to jobs, and other similar help. Taken together, these programmatic and policy changes can significantly impact segregation in the voucher program.
Center for Budget and Policy Priorities: A Guide to Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs)
Poverty & Race Research Action Council: Housing Mobility Programs in the U.S. 2022
Local Housing Solutions: Increased voucher payment standards in high-cost areas
Local Housing Solutions: Landlord recruitment and retention
Local Housing Solutions: Mobility counseling for housing choice voucher holders
Local and state governments have a history of placing more affordable housing in areas where disinvestment and segregation is accelerating, while wealthier and whiter areas are more likely to receive infrastructure investments, like flood protection, pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly street improvements, parks, and public transit. The Fair Housing Act’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) clause calls for a reversal of this cycle. Targeting infrastructure investments in disinvested and majority-Black and Brown neighborhoods can improve the quality of life for residents, increase climate resilience, and prevent serious decreases in property values.
Local Housing Solutions: Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing
Single-family zoning drives up the cost of housing and often helps to maintain segregation in exclusionary communities. Allowing builders and homeowners to add accessory dwelling units, often referred to as “mother-in-law units” on the same lot as a single-family home can create more rental options and help older people age-in-place. Local governments should also pursue some sort of subsidy program as well to ensure a significant portion of these new units are actually affordable, because increasing supply alone will not guarantee affordability. Similarly, allowing duplexes, triplexes, and quadruplexes in areas that previously only allowed single-family zoning can also increase the diversity of housing types and open communities to people who were previously kept out. In these new or rehabbed small multi-family dwellings, local governments should also require, or at least incentivize, one of the units to be affordable to truly make progress toward undoing segregation.
Local Housing Solutions: Accessory Dwelling Units
Local Housing Solutions: Zoning changes to allow for higher residential density
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: A State by State Guide to Zoning Reform
New Orleans allows “Small Multi-Family Affordable” developments in nearly all zoning districts.
Real estate wholesaling is the practice of buying houses below their market value and then reselling, often through a purchase contract, to another investor without making improvements. Wholesalers are most easily identified by the signs they regularly post around lower-income neighborhoods, loudly proclaiming “We Buy Houses For Cash” or something similar. A ProPublica report found that some wholesalers use deception and aggressive tactics to bully vulnerable homeowners into selling for less than their house is worth. Most states and local jurisdictions have few protections for homeowners in these scenarios. Examples of local protections include: requiring a cooling-off period of at least a week when a homeowner can cancel the contract, especially if the house was never publicly listed; requiring wholesalers to be licensed, creating a “do not call” list homeowners can add themselves to in order to avoid solicitations; and steep penalties for illegal solicitations or postings.
Public housing authorities may choose to operate Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Homeownership programs, which allow qualified HCV (“Sec. 8”) renters to apply their voucher to mortgage payments instead. Public housing authorities can also opt into running a Family Self Sufficiency program, which helps residents create a savings plan, offers supportive resources, and then sets up an escrow account to hold the difference of the rent the family pays when entering the program and the increased rent that would be charged as the family’s earned income increased. At the end of five years, families can access the savings, and when paired with the homeownership program, use the savings toward a down payment.
HUD: HCV Homeownership Program
From the 1930s-1960s, real estate speculators used land contracts, also known as contracts for deed, to prey on African American home buyers who were locked out of the traditional mortgage market by redlining and other discriminatory practices. In a land contract, the buyer makes monthly payments to the seller for years, but does not have the full rights of ownership until the entire purchase price has been paid. In the meantime, the seller can cancel the contract, keep all payments, and evict the buyer if they miss or are late on any payments. Corporate actors have revived the practice after purchasing foreclosed homes in bulk and are once again using land contracts to disproportionately sell the homes to buyers of color. Land contract sales are a lose-lose for the buyer because they provide none of the protections of homeownership and none of the legal rights of tenants. The National Consumer Law Center recommends that state and local jurisdictions enact protections that ensure that “until the buyers have all of the rights of homeownership, they should have all of the protections provided to tenants.”
National Consumer Law Center: Policy Recommendations for a Strong State Law on Land Contracts
The Pew Charitable Trusts: Less Than Half of States Have Laws Governing ‘Land Contracts’
Renter equity programs can help disproportionately Black and Brown renters living in affordable developments build wealth. Renter equity programs were first developed as a way to help renters in affordable housing developments build wealth in exchange for contributing to the upkeep and governance of the property. Renters received equity credits for paying rent on time, attending tenant meetings, or helping to clean common areas. Larger organizations and at least one state are bringing the model to scale by funding the construction or rehab of affordable rental developments and then requiring that any profit the building makes above a certain threshold needed to pay back debt and investors is shared with the tenants of the building. The equity is typically dispersed to tenants through monthly cash rebates.
Building wealth and community for renters in Cincinnati, OH
Enterprise Renter Wealth Creation Fund
Colorado Affordable Housing Finance Fund and enabling legislation
Local nuisance or “crime free” ordinances often have a disparate impact on survivors of domestic violence and have the potential to be weaponized against apartment complexes by disapproving neighbors. The policies often penalize tenants or property owners for 911 calls, placing survivors of violence in the unacceptable position of choosing to call for help or facing eviction. Repealing these ordinances and focusing on functional health and safety regulations for rental housing can protect renters at risk of displacement.
National Housing Law Project: Nuisance and Crime-Free Ordinances Initiative
Source of income (SOI) anti-discrimination ordinances are local or state-wide legislation that bars landlords from discriminating against prospective renters who have a Housing Choice Voucher (“Sec. 8”). Most ordinances also bar discrimination against people accessing other government programs, such as food stamps, disability, or veterans benefits. Ordinances should specifically name housing vouchers as a covered form of income, as some state courts have ruled that unless specifically named, they do not count as a protected source of income. SOI ordinances should also prohibit landlords from setting a minimum income requirement based on the entire rent–instead, any minimum income requirement should be based only on the tenant’s portion of the rent. Enforcement and oversight are also key to the success of these laws.
Special Purpose Credit Programs include race-conscious loan programs specifically authorized under the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA). They allow a lender to offer assistance to specific groups that would otherwise be denied credit or receive it on less favorable terms. Most SPCPs offer loans or grants to Black and/or Brown first-time homebuyers. SPCPs may be especially well suited to exclusionary low-opportunity areas because they can help buyers of color in accessing these otherwise exclusionary areas without offering so much assistance per family as to make the fund unsustainable.
National Fair Housing Alliance: Special Purpose Credit Programs Toolkit
Especially in areas where disinvestment is accelerating, badly maintained vacant properties can drive down property values for homeowners and often have a disparate impact on Black and Brown communities. Vacant property registries are a common tool local governments use to track and manage these properties until they can be returned to use.
Local Housing Solutions: Creating and managing vacant property inventories
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