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Editorial

Affordable Housing, Racial Isolation

Camden, N.J.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

A Supreme Court ruling last week forcefully reminded state and local governments that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 forbids them from spending federal housing money in ways that perpetuate segregation. Communities across the country have been doing exactly that for decades.

Instead of building subsidized housing in racially integrated areas that offer minority citizens access to jobs and good schools, local governments have often deepened racial isolation by placing such housing in existing ghettos.

Justice Anthony Kennedy delivered this timely message in the majority opinion, ruling that the law allows plaintiffs to challenge housing policies that have a discriminatory effect — without having to prove that discrimination was intentional.

He traces the problem of racial isolation back to the mid-20th century, when restrictive covenants, redlining and government-sponsored mortgage discrimination undercut black wealth creation, accelerated ghetto-ization and walled off black families in the urban communities that exploded in the riots of the 1960s.

The ruling comes at a time of growing tension between civil rights lawyers and affordable housing developers over where low-income housing should be built and whether locations (often the path of least resistance) perpetuate segregation.

Congress hoped to end historic patterns of segregation by passing the Fair Housing Act, which required governments getting federal money to “affirmatively further” fair housing goals. But for decades, federal, state and local officials declined to enforce the law, leaving the fight to civil rights groups, who often filed lawsuits on behalf of discrimination victims.

The current case, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, concerns a federal tax credit program used by states and local governments to build affordable housing. The plaintiff, a nonprofit group, sued Texas, arguing that the state had violated the Fair Housing Act and perpetuated segregation by allocating too many tax credits to projects in predominantly black inner city areas and too few in predominantly white suburban areas.

The Supreme Court ruled that a discrimination charge could be based on the fact that a policy had a “disparate impact” on black citizens and sent the case back to the lower court for further proceedings.

Earlier this year, a study from the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School found that the Twin Cities region had become more segregated, as compared to demographically similar regions like Portland or Seattle, because too large a share of affordable housing has been in impoverished black areas. The developers have rationalized the building in those places by calling it economic redevelopment, the authors said, but the evidence suggests that the building merely intensified segregation and the concentration of poverty.

A similar dispute between fair housing advocates and a nonprofit housing developer erupted recently in Connecticut, when the legislature took up but failed to pass a bill that would have required that most housing units supported by tax credits be built in high opportunity areas, where poverty is low and schools thrive. An analysis based on state data showed that nearly three-quarters of tax credit units have been located in high poverty, minority areas that make up less than 11 percent of the land in one of the most affluent states in the country.

The advocacy group, Open Communities Alliance, argued that the current way of using tax credits reinforces inequality by denying minority citizens access to areas of the state that have better schools and employment opportunities.

For their part, the developers argue that there are too few resources to meet housing needs in poor neighborhoods. While that’s also true, it is a misrepresentation to describe new housing alone as “revitalization” in the absence of things like good schools and job opportunities that make for vibrant, economically healthy communities.

As Justice Kennedy wrote, the Fair Housing Act has an important role to play in the country’s struggle against racial isolation and avoiding the grim prophecy that President Lyndon Johnson’s Kerner Commission enunciated five decades ago, when it said that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” It’s the duty of the federal and state governments to ensure that affordable housing policies do not make racial isolation worse.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Affordable Housing, Racial Isolation . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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