Housing Integration in Westchester

Yesterday’s New York Times brought welcome news that suburban Westchester County New York had agreed to a landmark housing desegregation settlement to create more than 600 homes and apartments for moderate income residents in overwhelmingly white communities.  For many people, the idea of integration – of housing and of schools – has a 1970's ring to it, but if we really want to provide equal opportunity for kids, and to fulfill the promise of a single nation, the Westchester agreement must be a harbinger of things to come.

As outlined in the front page Times article, the settlement arises from a complaint filed by a fair housing group, backed up by the Obama Administration, that Westchester County had failed to comply with mandates to encourage fair housing when receiving federal Community Development Block Grants funds.  The modest agreement – which involves just over 600 residences in a county with a population of close to 1 million – still needs to be ratified by the County Board of Legislators.

Two particularly noteworthy elements of the settlement stand out.

First, it represents an effort to economically and racially integrate highly privileged white communities such as Larchmont, Rye, and Scarsdale rather than working class communities like Yonkers.  This is important for both substantive and political reasons.

Substantively, the best results for kids have come when low-income students are given a chance to attend affluent suburban schools.  Chicago’s housing desegregation program that arose from the Gautreaux litigation was highly successful:  low-income students in affluent suburbs were four times as likely to graduate from high school as those who applied for the program but were placed in urban schools.  By contrast, the federal Moving to Opportunity program, which provided low income students a chance to live in working class neighborhoods and attend only marginally more affluent schools, saw negligible results.  Efforts to integrate mostly poor blacks and poor whites in Boston’s public schools produced no real achievement gains, while low income students who were allowed, under Montgomery County’s Maryland’s inclusionary zoning law, to live in affluent neighborhoods far outperformed those in high poverty schools.

Politically, the focus on affluent communities is important because part of the Reagan Democrat backlash against “limousine liberals” was the feeling that blue collar whites were being singled out for integration.  In Boston, J. Anthony Lukas wrote in his stunning account of the busing crisis, Common Ground, working class whites came “to understand it was easy to be liberal about other people’s problems.  Maybe that was why all the problems were in the city and all the liberals were in the suburbs.”   The Westchester settlement stands as a rebuke to that familiar pattern.

Second, the settlement is important because the Obama Administration actively pushed for it.  The Times article quotes Ron Sims, the deputy secretary of housing and urban development, saying, “This is consistent with the president’s desire to see a fully integrated society.”  He continued, “Until now, we tended to lay dormant.  This is historic, because we are going to hold people’s feet to the fire.”

In the education and housing realm, Obama has placed much more emphasis on trying to improve high poverty schools – through charter programs like the Harlem Children’s Zone – than presidential candidate John Edwards, who sought to integrate housing and schooling by economic status.  Given the difficulty of making separate but equal work, the housing settlement in Westchester County is a welcome shift for the administration – and a potent symbol of the enduring significance of integration in the 21st Century .