Housing Segregation is the root cause of poverty

Christy Regis had only recently gone from working three jobs to one when the dreaded “notice to quit possession” notice fluttered from her Stratford apartment door in August. The pre-eviction warning nudging Regis and her 2-year-old daughter out of their home came after she fell $1,000 behind on her rent because she used the money instead to fix her 13-year-old, broken-down Nissan. With nowhere else to go, the pair moved in with Regis’ mother, uncle, and brother in Milford. Regis has since started a second job and said she will likely need a third if she hopes to rent another home in a safe community with decent schools. “Even when I was working, the amount I was investing in child care and everything, it just did not add up and it was just like the money was going everywhere but where it needed to,” Regis said. “We needed to eat. It got to the point where it was like you had to pick and choose what you put your money to.” Regis’ dilemma – not being able to afford a home in a suburban area – is a common one for many of Connecticut’s low-income residents, particularly people of color, because of the state’s longstanding and widespread lack of affordable housing. Local housing advocates place racism – and the now-illegal practice of redlining – at the center of a complicated web of factors that have led to persistent disparities in housing options available to people of color and whites. Despite the Malloy administration’s efforts over the last eight years to create more housing opportunities, the problem remains intractable, advocates say, due to restrictive zoning ordinances, persistent segregation, and housing discrimination. Research by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University indicates a majority of black and Latino households in Connecticut live in areas with high crime and poverty rates, low-performing schools, and a lack of employment opportunities. This is typically coupled with black and Latinos’ disproportionately lower incomes — leaving them with a greater need for affordable housing and spurring the development and rehabilitation of those units in urban areas. Though wealth inequality — the differences between different households’ income, stocks, property, and other assets and debts — is one of the chief forces of division in modern society, more economists are becoming increasingly focused on differences in the housing component of the phenomenon. Representing both the disparities between housing quality and the availability of affordable shelter, housing inequality stems both from market forces as well as discrimination and segregation. It can be both the cause and the effect of poverty. Richard Florida, a professor and director at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, wrote in an April 2018 essay in CityLab that “a mounting body of research suggests that housing inequality may well be the biggest contributor to our economic divides.” “The ability to buy and own housing, much more than income or any other source of wealth, is a significant factor in the growing divides between the economy’s winners and losers,” Florida wrote. “It’s a matter of liberty and opportunity. If you’re stuck in a kind of de facto apartheid where you can only live in certain places because price of admission to other towns is too high — you have a problem.” David Fink, Partnership for Strong Communities Low-income families’ lack of housing mobility often leaves them with fewer choices, said David Fink, a consultant for Partnership for Strong Communities. “They have greater access to child care, health care, recreation, and fresh food by living in those [suburban] places,” Fink said. “It’s a matter of liberty and opportunity. If you’re stuck in a kind of de facto apartheid where you can only live in certain places because price of admission to other towns is too high — you have a problem.” While affordable housing has remained largely concentrated in Connecticut’s biggest municipalities, cities and towns’ sovereignty over their zoning laws has amplified the divide. More than two dozen municipalities across Connecticut have enacted strict zoning ordinances prohibiting multi-family housing, a type of development housing advocates describe as the most effective way achieve affordability. Other communities have fought efforts to create affordable housing within their borders, with residents often voicing concerns it will change the character of their town or bring traffic. The state has long used the 1990 8-30g law — also known as Title 8 — as a measuring stick for evaluating Connecticut’s broad access to affordable housing. That law encourages, but does not require, all municipalities to have 10 percent of their housing stock deemed affordable. Under the statute, developers who build affordable units can appeal to the courts to override local zoning codes in towns that don’t meet that threshold. Non-exempt municipalities can meet a four-year moratorium if they are successful in increasing their affordable housing stock by two percent. In 2017, only 30 of Connecticut’s 169 municipalities met or exceeded the 10 percent threshold, according to the latest Affordable Housing Appeals List. Connecticut’s persistent problems in this area fall squarely amid a nationwide affordable housing crisis that has led states to tackle rising housing costs by building upward. In 2016, Connecticut had 140,531 households whose incomes met the definition of “extremely low,” according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The NLIHC found the state had 36 affordable and available homes per 100 renter households in that category. In another recent report, the NLIHC ranked Connecticut as having the ninth most expensive housing wage in the nation. It found that renters make an average of $17.38 an hour, while the full-time hourly wage needed to afford a decent two-bedroom apartment is $24.90. That means those earning the $10.10 state minimum wage would have to work 99 hours a week to comfortably afford that apartment. For people of color, however, the struggle to find affordable housing in safe communities with good schools is complicated by more than just a wage gap.