Study: Affordable Housing Policy Increases Segregation in the Twin Cities

Peter Callaghen reports on a study released recently by Myron Orfield, University of Minnesota law professor and director of the school's Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, that lays the blame for segregation in the Twin Cities region on unintended consequences of housing policy and education reforms.  

The study compares findings about the neighborhoods and parts of the city that low-income black residents call home in the Twin Cities to similar populations in Seattle and Portland [pdf]. The study finds that in 2012, "19 percent of low-income black residents of the Twin Cities live in high-poverty census tracts (up from 13 percent in 2000) compared to just 3.4 percent of low-income black residents in Seattle (down from 3.5 percent in 2000) and 1.6 percent in Portland (down from 1.9 percent in 2000)."

As for the housing policies that increased segregation, the study specifically blames "policies and practices that redirected affordable housing programs from mostly white suburbs back to segregated neighborhoods in Minneapolis, St. Paul and first-tier suburbs such as Brooklyn Center and Richfield." The effect of centralizing affordable housing, according to Orfield's argument: segregation.

Callaghan explains further: "Between 2002 and 2011, the report notes, the region produced 2,249 new affordable units (affordable defined as being within reach of those earning 30 percent of the metro area’s median income). Ninety-two percent of these units were located in the central cities, the study reports." According to Orfield, that amounts to the central cities receiving "four times their fair share of very low-income units."

Orfield's lays the blame for the negative effects of affordable housing policy at the feet of the "Poverty Housing Industry"—or, as Orfield describes it, "a web of tightly interconnected government agencies, non-profits, private developers, banks, and investors, all dependent upon a profitable model of building low-income housing in poor central city neighborhoods."