Tag Archives: social class

More on “Obama wants to reengineer your neighborhood”

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Commenting on HUD’s plans to introduce more poorer residents into wealthier communities, a conservative argues this is an assault on the ability to sort by social class:

This is not about blocking housing discrimination, which has been illegal since 1968. It is unlawful for someone to deny you a loan or prevent you from buying a home because of your race, creed or color. Socioeconomic status is — and ought to be — another matter. If you want to buy a nice house in the suburbs, you have to be able to afford it. Apparently, Obama thinks that’s unfair discrimination by the “holders of capital.”

Putting decisions about how local communities are run in the hands of federal bureaucrats is an assault on freedom. Local autonomy is essential to liberty. As Milton Friedman put it in “Capitalism and Freedom,” “If I don’t like what my local community does, be it in sewage disposal, zoning or schools, I can move to another local community. .?.?. If I don’t like what my state does, I can move to another. If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations.” Washington has no business imposing decisions about zoning and housing policies on thousands of local communities…

Having Washington micromanage the housing and zoning policies of thousands of local communities is not going to change this. The answer is not to force local governments to build affordable housing in affluent communities. The answer is to restore upward mobility in the United States so that more people can afford housing in affluent communities.

Free markets can solve residential segregation, right? Except this simply hasn’t worked over time in the United States. The end of the argument in this article suggests the Obama administration has not been good for poorer Americans. This may be the case but there aren’t many (or any?) magic free trade eras in American history where people of different races and backgrounds could move wherever they wanted even when in the same social class. For example, research in recent years continues to suggests that blacks and Latinos who have the same or similar socioeconomic status as whites tend to live in poorer neighborhoods. Urban renewal – when the government forces residents out of poorer neighborhoods for newer development projects usually benefiting wealthier people – may not work but neither would a completely unfettered market.

Additionally, race and ethnicity are intimately tied to social class in the United States. To suggest that we can easily not discriminate by race but social class is something different ignores the realities of how these key life factors have worked together for hundreds of years.

How to get wealthier communities to accept affordable housing

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This article discusses two tools to promote affordable housing in wealthier communities: regulations and lawsuits.

But Massachusetts has a work-around: A state statute, called 40B, allows developers to get around exclusionary zoning and build affordable housing in communities where only a small percentage of units are considered affordable. (A few other states have similar policies.) The statute, passed in 1969 and upheld by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in 1973, has led to the construction of 1,300 developments throughout the state, containing a total of 34,000 units of affordable housing, according to Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, or CHAPA.Projects built under 40B are almost always controversial: The statute was enacted in the first place because most communities outside of big cities didn’t permit multi-family housing, said Ann Verrilli, the director of research at CHAPA. Even with the statute, communities often spend millions of dollars in legal fees to try and stop the projects, Verrilli told me…

The experience of developers trying to build affordable housing in Massachusetts takes on added significance now, as housing advocates wait for a decision on a landmark case in front of the Supreme Court that concerns where low-income housing projects are placed. The case, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, arose when a nonprofit housing group sued Texas, arguing that the state primarily distributed tax credits for low-income housing projects in minority-dominated areas. Inclusive Communities argued that doing so perpetuated segregation and violated the Fair Housing Act, which was passed in 1968 to prevent landlords, municipalities, banks and other housing providers from discriminating on the basis of race. The Supreme Court case centers on whether this discrimination has to be intentional in order to be illegal, or whether the Fair Housing Act also seeks to prevent policies that may not be intentionally discriminatory, but that have a “disparate impact” on minorities…

Many affordable housing units in the suburbs are a direct result of court cases, and even enforcement of those programs are lax. In 2009, Westchester County in New York signed a desegregation agreement and agreed to build and market hundreds of apartments for moderate-income minorities after a court found it had misled HUD by applying for funds that it said it would use to integrate housing, and then did the opposite. Four years later, the county had not complied with the provisions.

The shift from discriminatory race-based housing policies to economic ones in the 1960s and 1970s was an important one. I suggest reading David Freund’s Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America. This is the logic still used today: better off residents argue that they worked hard to get to their higher quality of life and that others should have to do the same. But, since race/ethnicity and social class are inextricably linked, keeping out the lower classes through big lots, expensive properties, a lack of apartments, and other methods leads perpetuates residential segregation.

Two other relevant points from this article. First, affordable housing in the suburbs can be done well through good design and not high levels of concentration. Second, given the resistance to such projects as well as design guidelines that are helpful, still nowhere near enough affordable housing has been constructed. In one sense, the foot draggers of wealthy communities are winning because they have slowed down a process started by the courts in the late 1960s (the Gautreaux case) and 1970s (the Mount Laurel case). Plus, the wealthy can move easily if their properties are threatened.

Studying suburban, middle-class drug dealers

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A new book from two sociologists details the lives of suburban drug dealers in Georgia:

But drug users and sellers are busy in city suburbs, too. And many of the sellers are teenagers. That’s according to a newly published sociological study focusing on why middle-class, suburban youth get involved in the drug business.

The study was conducted in a wealthy metro Atlanta suburb.

Authors Scott Jacques and Richard Wright wrote the resulting book called “Code of the Suburb:  Inside the World of Young Middle-Class Drug Dealers.”…

Jacques interviewed some 30 young drug dealers for the book – many of them high school friends of his.

Even with plenty of evidence that drug use is a regular feature of suburban life (illustrated by the heroin outbreak in the Chicago suburbs in the last year or two), such deviance is often associated with cities and lower-class residents. This reminds me of the classic study “The Saints and the Roughnecks.” Two groups of delinquent boys in a town are treated differently by social class: despite similar rates of delinquency, the higher class boys were not arrested and it was expected that they would grow out of the behavior and contribute positively to society as adults. In contrast, the lower class boys were punished more harshly and took on the expectations the community had for them as delinquents.

Naperville named safest American city over 100,000 people

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Niche.com recently named Naperville the safest American city:

The rankings were based on evaluations from 215 cities with populations of more than 100,000 residents and included analysis of the city’s violent and property crime data, including murder, assault, robbery, burglary, larceny and vehicle theft rates.

Niche, a Pittsburgh-based ranking and review web site, used the 2013 FBI Uniform Crime Report “Crime in the United States,” an annual publication that reports the number and rate of violent and property crime offenses. They then used a formula to determine the city’s safety ranking, which includes weighting the crime by category: murder rate at 30 percent; assault and robbery at 20 percent each; and burglary and larceny at 10 percent each.

Two Naperville officials are quoted in the story praising crime prevention efforts. This helps but my guess regarding the bigger factor is the wealth of the community. According to the latest (2013) Census estimates: Naperville has a median household income of $108,302, the poverty rate is 4.1%, and the percent of residents with a high school degree is 96.5% and 65.9% have a bachelor’s degree. There are plenty of wealthy communities in the United States but they tend to be smaller. Once you get cities bigger than 100,000, it is hard to find many that have the number of educated and wealthy residents as Naperville.

Summarizing 25 years of researching the lives of 790 Baltimore kids

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Three sociologists followed 790 Baltimore children over 25 years and published a book of their findings in 2014. Here is a quick summary of their results:

“The implication is where you start in life is where you end up in life,” Alexander said. “It’s very sobering to see how this all unfolds.”

Among the most striking findings:

  • Almost none of the children from low-income families made it through college. Of the children from low-income families, only 4 percent had a college degree at age 28, compared to 45 percent of the children from higher-income backgrounds. “That’s a shocking tenfold difference across social lines,” Alexander said.
  • Among those who did not attend college, white men from low-income backgrounds found the best-paying jobs. Although they had the lowest rate of college attendance and completion, white men from low-income backgrounds found high-paying jobs in what remained of Baltimore’s industrial economy. At age 28, 45 percent of them were working in construction trades and industrial crafts, compared with 15 percent of black men from similar backgrounds and virtually no women. In those trades, whites earned, on average, more than twice what blacks made. Those well-paying blue collar jobs are not as abundant as during the years after World War II, but they still exist, and a large issue today is who gets them: Among high school dropouts, at age 22, 89 percent of white dropouts were working compared with 40 percent of black dropouts.
  • White women from low-income backgrounds benefit financially from marriage and stable live-in partnerships. Though both white and black women who grew up in lower-income households earned less than white men, when you consider household income, white women reached parity with white men — because they were married to them. Black women not only had low earnings, they were less likely than whites to be in stable family unions and so were less likely to benefit from a spouse’s earnings. White and black women from low-income households also had similar teen birth rates, but white women more often had a spouse or partner, a relationship that helped mitigate the challenges. “It is access to good paying work that perpetuates the privilege of working class white men over working class black men,” Alexander said. “By partnering with these men, white working class women share in that privilege.”
  • Better-off white men were most likely to abuse drugs. Better-off white men had the highest self-reported rates of drug use, binge drinking, and chronic smoking, followed in each instance by white men of disadvantaged families; in addition, all these men reported high levels of arrest. At age 28, 41 percent of white men — and 49 percent of black men — from low-income backgrounds had a criminal conviction, but the white employment rate was much higher. The reason, Alexander says, is that blacks don’t have the social networks whites do to help them find jobs despite these roadblocks.

My quick interpretation: race and class still matter. White children could access jobs through social networks (a point also made in Deidre Royster’s Race and the Invisible Hand study of vocational students in Baltimore) and could still get jobs even with deviant behavior. White women partner with these white men and do better as a result. Starting in families with higher incomes leads to a higher likelihood of going to college. That these two social factors continue to matter should not be surprising – look at the life outcomes and changes by race/ethnicity and income for all American adults – but their presence can get drowned out.

Middle-class Americans pay a higher proportion of expenses for transportation

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Driving and a suburban lifestyle comes with a price: recent data suggests the middle-class pays more for transportation that wealthier and poorer Americans.

In this case, the numbers show that middle-class Americans spend a much higher share of their total household annual expenditures on getting around, compared with the poorest and richest groups. Instead of gentle downward slopes, the transportation shares are closer to a bell curve (with the sixth decile added in for emphasis):

CityLab

The same surprising distribution holds true when we drill down into a subset of transportation costs. The middle-class pays an outsized share on gas, vehicle maintenance, car insurance, and “other” related expenses—with the fifth decile above the medians (4.9, 1.6, 2, and 5.1 percent, respectively) in every case…

The data don’t say why transportation is taking a disproportionate toll on middle-class wallets, but it’s not hard to target a confluence of factors: sprawling development, city housing affordability, poor transit investment, and the result of them all, car-reliance.

I wonder if this then means that driving is an aspirational activity: it offers independence and access to private suburban property but it can be quite costly. If you don’t have a certain level of income, such a lifestyle may not make much sense. But, after a certain point, one can aspire to join the wealthier people who can better afford it (and probably have nicer cars and bigger houses).

Contrasting living in a McMansion and a micro-unit

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Real-life tales of living in a McMansion and a micro-unit! First, the residents of the 7,500 square foot McMansion and then the 344 square foot micro-unit dweller:

The McColls lived in Arlington for years before deciding last fall that it had become too dense. “The straw that broke the camel’s back,” Kim says, “was when I saw my kids playing in the back yard and I had to shush them because it was too loud for the neighbors.” Their five-bedroom in Loudoun County’s Willowsford development has two offices—key because they often work from home—and abundant entertaining space. Also: More than 20 miles of nearby trails means the kids have room to shriek all they want.

Williams sold most of her furniture and sacrificed proximity to family when she left her 1,100-square-foot condo in Olney for a micro-unit in a building on DC’s 14th Street, Northwest. And she has no regrets. Because she isn’t much of a cook, the sliver of a kitchen is no big deal, and she didn’t have to give up her one must-have, a bathtub. (It’s off the hallway.) Before, her closer-in friends didn’t like driving out to Olney; now she can socialize without leaving her floor. “When Scandal comes on, the neighbors down the hall cook and have people over. They have a junior one-bedroom—they have room for a couch.”

Quite the difference in housing units. This is fairly obvious from the floor plans. But, I suspect this goes deeper and Bourdieu’s theories about social class may provide some explanatory leverage. Would these two sets of residents ever cross paths? Or do their housing choices suggest such different tastes and lifestyle choices that they might never interact and if they did know each other, not spend time in the home of the other? One life revolves around work and friends close by while the other involves children and space. I would guess the decorating is different as are the leisure activities pursued by each group.

In other words, these housing choices may just be the tip of the iceberg of deeply-rooted social clusters. Would the micro-apartment dweller ever live in a McMansion, let alone even imagine it?

Wealthier LA neighborhoods use on average three times as much water

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As California faces a major water shortage, a new analysis shows wealthier Los Angeles neighborhoods use much more water:

Residents in communities such as La Canada Flintridge, Newport Beach, Malibu and Palos Verdes all used more than 150 gallons of water per capita per day in January. By contrast, Santa Ana used just 38 gallons and communities in Southeast L.A. County used less than 45.

Water usage in Los Angeles was 70 gallons per capita. But within the city, a recent UCLA study examining a decade of Department of Water and Power data showed that on average, wealthier neighborhoods consume three times more water than less-affluent ones.

With Gov. Jerry Brown’s order requiring a 25% cut in water consumption, upscale communities are scrambling to develop stricter laws that will work where years of voluntary standards have not. Many believe it’s going to take a change in culture as well as city rules to hit the goal…

High water use by upscale cities is about more than lifestyle. These communities tend to have fewer apartments and less dense housing. The dwellings tend to be larger and include sprawling grounds in need of water. The UCLA study found that owners of single-family homes often over-water when restrictions are not in place.

One suggestion I’ve seen in multiple places is that municipal water in the United States is much too cheap so rates should be raised to help customers think twice. Yet, this cost wouldn’t be as much of a hindrance to wealthier residents as the wealthy can move more easily or purchase water from elsewhere. Additionally, using more water may just be seen as a necessary part of life, particularly if they see water usage as part of the good or high status life with amenities like fountains and pools or it is tied to property values. Does this mean we need regressive water rates that can be adjusted for different income levels so that the prices can properly prompt second thoughts?

More broadly, this hints at one of the less-discussed benefits of being wealthy: paying less attention to basic needs for resources like electricity, water, and gas or natural gas. Plus, they may have opportunities to profit off these resources – such as through investing in energy companies or influencing local design-making – in ways that lower or middle class residents cannot.

Scatter-site public housing also won’t work in providing affordable housing?

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Megan McArdle argues neither concentrated public housing or scatter-site public housing can effectively address the issues of affordable housing:

And so here we are: The government simply has relatively little power to create more affordable housing in the face of massively increasing demand for homes in desirable cities like Washington, New York and San Francisco. It can create some units that will benefit a few people. It can slow the process of gentrification a bit. But the dream of adding all those new, affordable-housing-advocating, affluent young people to the city, while allowing the former residents to stay in place, seems to me to be just that: a dream. A nice dream. But still a dream, which like all dreams will eventually evaporate as reality overtakes it.

McArdle suggests the economic and political realities are too tough for affordable housing to do well and to limit gentrification. I would also suggest that this hints at the ongoing influence of race and class. While this could be spun as the result of economic laws (supply and demand) and politics (certain urban residents have more of a political voice and ability to influence decision-making), race and class underlie much of this. Who are the people who live in affordable or subsidized housing? Who are the people who tend to live in more exclusive communities or who are doing the gentrifying? These patterns of race and class are much broader than just the hot neighborhoods in major cities; they influence many of the settlement patterns across the United States.

Despite the pessimism here, this also means there is a big opportunity to figure this out. Are there contexts where affordable housing on a big enough scale works? Places where race and class matter less? Methods where both protecting property rights and providing for those with resources can coexist?

Suburbanites who don’t like proposals for affordable housing in the Twin Cities region

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The Metropolitan Council for the Minneapolis-St. Paul region is working on plans for affordable housing but a number of suburbanites are not pleased with where the affordable housing might go:

The Met Council sees a growing problem. Its own newly available data suggest that annual production of affordable housing has dropped by hundreds of units since 2010, even as market-rate housing has rebounded.

An advance peek at the Met Council’s proposed goals, to be released late Monday, shows that communities considered to be prime locations for adding affordable units include upper income suburbs, such as North Oaks and Eden Prairie, and cornfield’s-edge fringe communities such as Minnetrista and Lake Elmo…

The target numbers — released this week for public comment, with adjustments possible from now to July — are part of a once-per-decade planning process that will begin in every city this fall. Each must start to figure out how to accommodate the additional units.

The Met Council is under heavy fire for allegedly pushing too much affordable housing into areas with plenty of it already, intensifying concentrations of poverty and perpetuating racial segregation in the Twin Cities.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The region has a history of metropolitanization, a rare occurrence in American cities, as well as an openness to immigrants, yet advancing affordable housing units in middle- to upper-end suburbs may be going too far. As some of the suburbanites in the article note, they moved to these communities to escape issues like this. But, the quality of life concerns they tend to express (good school, low crime, sense of community) seem to be inextricably linked with race/ethnicity and social class. Just a reminder that part of the benefits of having money in the United States is that one can move to such a place that insulates you against interacting with others.