Workshop Recap: Persistence of Residential Segregation
On Thursday, September 23rd, SCANPH convened for a special workshop session featuring Professor Stephen Menendian, Director of Research at Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute. Professor Menendian spearheaded the “Roots of Structural Racism” study revealing the persistence of racial residential segregation and its consequences. The project mapped US census tracts to show harmful levels of segregation. Professor Menendian’s work aims to show how racial residential segregation lies at the heart of inequality. An expert in fair housing, civil rights, affirmative action and structural racism, Professor Menendian has led research investigating the persistence of racial residential segregation across the United States, including Southern California.
In this session, Professor Menendian shared key research findings on the topic of deconstructing California’s housing crisis. Although “the housing crisis” is often conflated as a single term, it is important to clarify its meaning because different problems require different solutions. Under the expanse of California’s housing crisis, interrelated crises operate; including the affordable housing crisis, the production crisis, the jobs/housing balance crisis, housing fit and spatial mismatch, and the crisis of sprawl. These separate yet intertwined issues contribute to housing development in exurbs and on the urban fringe, pushing workers farther away from urban areas, contributing to greater fire risk, super commuting, health degradation and placing strain on sites of childcare.
Throughout the session, Professor Menendian shared how the fair housing crisis leads to the persistence of racial residential segregation and its profoundly harmful effects. Disparities in homeownership rates are serious contributors to the racial wealth gap. Clarifying that affordable housing and fair housing imply entirely different ideas, the terms are frequently conflated. While affordable housing relates to subsidized, filtered or naturally affordable housing, fair housing relates to social concepts of housing, coming out of the “open housing” movement. When we conflate affordable housing and fair housing we introduce policy tradeoffs. Historically and contemporarily, when the US builds the maximum amount of affordable housing, racial and economic segregation can be exacerbated in racial and economic areas of poverty (RECAPS). Further, Professor Menendian outlined research demonstrating how LIHTC, America’s largest affordable housing program, has led to some reinforcement of racial segregation by sitating developments in RECAPs.
To answer the question of why racial residential segregation persists, Professor Menendian points to several phases; restrictive covenants and deed restrictions on homes, used by the federal government to extend and deepen racial residential segregation through redlining and contemporary zoning policy, in addition to single family zoning.