City Lab, September 17, 2018: Why won’t Ben Carson confront discrimination?
Speaking at a gathering of public housing authority directors in Washington, D.C. earlier this week, HUD Secretary Ben Carson re-upped his argument that affirmatively furthering fair housing—which in principle means desegregating neighborhoods—actually just means building more housing.
Said Carson at the gathering:
“While the prior [AFFH] rule focuses on analytics to discover discrimination, I want to take a closer look at the archaic local and state regulatory barriers—such as zoning and land use restrictions—that are preventing the construction of new mixed-income multifamily developments, whether in poor or wealthier neighborhoods.”
The prior rule Carson referenced included tools that local housing agencies could use to root out housing segregation. The purpose of those tools was also to find ways to distribute housing subsidies more fairly across a broader swath of neighborhoods instead of concentrating them in impoverished neighborhoods, as HUD has done historically. But as Carson noted, he’s not really all that concerned about discrimination, which is why he’s been nixing those prior rules. Rather, as he explained to the public housing directors, he wants to figure out how he can turn NIMBYs into YIMBYs, and also how to get more landlords to accept housing vouchers from low-income tenants. He announced that he’d be conducting a “landlord engagement listening tour” later this month to help him out with this.
The day after Carson made the speech, a study from a group of economists began circulating heavily on Twitter: It found that African Americans pay more in rent for identical housing in identical neighborhoods than white tenants do—a gap that increases the whiter a neighborhood becomes.
The study notes:
“In equilibrium, the aversion of some landlords to dealing with black tenants and the aversion of some white tenants to black neighbors should lead to a sorting of landlords and tenants. Landlords with little or no aversion to dealing with blacks should work in predominantly black areas and landlords with the greatest aversion in predominantly white areas. A similar sorting across neighborhoods will occur for white tenants. As a result, the black rent premium is likely to be greatest in heavily white neighborhoods. Racial rent differences might also reflect differences in the revenue that landlords expect to receive from people of different races and expected differences in the cost of serving them (Ewers, Tomlin, and Wang 2014). These expectations might be based on prejudice or experience.”
HUD released three major studies this year that identify the various ways that black and Latino tenants face discrimination in the rental market, and why landlords refuse to accept tenants with vouchers. Carson acknowledged these studies at the public housing directors gathering, but only mentioned how landlords were frustrated with “paperwork,” inspections, and how local housing authorities manage tenant disputes. Meanwhile, the studies from his office reveal far more than that, granularly detailing exactly how landlords discriminate against people who use vouchers and why.
Taken together, the discrimination that people of color and voucher-holding tenants face is well documented, particularly in Carson’s own wheelhouse. At the public housing directors gathering, Carson mentioned some of the policy recommendations from the “Urban Landlords” study that he thought could help improve voucher acceptance: insurance programs to help landlords pay for damages in rental units, and loans for landlords to renovate properties. And he also, again, said he wants to incentivize building more mixed-income multifamily housing complexes.
Eradicating exclusionary zoning regulations will help, but it won’t totally resolve the problems of landlords racially profiling potential tenants, the concentration of racial minorities and voucher holders in segregated communities, or the extra “racial premium” African Americans end up paying for the same kind of housing as white tenants. At some point, Carson will have to address the discrimination.
