Fair Housing: Cuomo (finally) gets it right

In the 2014 gubernatorial campaign, Gov. Andrew Cuomo directed fire at his Republican rival, Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, for allegedly countenancing racial discrimination in housing. Cuomo charged that wealthy suburbs – the governor himself is a resident of leafy Mt. Kisco – use zoning to discriminate and “don’t want the people who come along with affordable housing in their community.” Astorino, for his part, has said that it’s a mistake to believe that “zoning and discrimination are the same. They are not. Zoning restricts what can be built, not who lives there.” In other words, no one who can afford to live somewhere should be prohibited from doing so – by racial discrimination.

With less notice than it deserves, Cuomo has quietly come around to Astorino’s view. Cuomo has done so by reinvigorating an approach that has been de-emphasized in recent years but certainly deserves rediscovery – an approach to fair housing based not on numbers and statistics, but actual discrimination. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the federal agency which Cuomo once headed, should take notice and back off its own misguided effort to achieve the same goal.

The new statewide anti-discrimination approach, which Cuomo announced earlier this month at Harlem’s Convent Avenue Baptist Church, will send undercover teams of “testers” hired by the state to determine whether realtors are treating minority home-purchase or rental prospects differently than whites.

It may not seem like a revolutionary approach to the problem and, indeed, such discrimination has long been illegal at the federal level since the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which passed four days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Indeed, in the King tradition, state discrimination testers will determine whether those seeking housing are being judged “not by the color of their skin but the content of their character” – the latter as evidenced, in part, by their sheer ability to pay the same rent or mortgage as anyone else.

As common sense as this approach may be, it has recently fallen out of favor. Instead, HUD has taken up an approach based on “disparate impact” – if housing policies and prices lead to fewer racial minorities living in certain jurisdictions, then discrimination must, by definition, exist. It’s this perspective that has driven HUD’s effort in Westchester County, where a legal technicality – the question is not whether the county discriminated but whether it used federal funds to develop a plan to limit discrimination – has led to a protracted court fight.

HUD has pushed for a remedy that’s a long way from the Cuomo approach. Instead, it is calling for the county to subsidize some 800 units of low-income housing, to take steps to locate that housing in wealthy communities, and to market the housing to minority households. The fact that minority households are already widely dispersed across Westchester County, generally in proportions one would expect are based on income, did not matter to federal officials.

The HUD approach, whatever its good intentions, overlooks possible repercussions. American neighborhoods are, as a practical matter, agglomerations of households with similar income and educational backgrounds. Minority households who move into neighborhoods with which they share income and educational attributes are unlikely to attract special attention or animosity. In contrast, subsidized housing in middle-class neighborhoods has, historically, been a flash point for controversy. Racial integration as a positive side effect of minority upward mobility is a recipe for sustained camaraderie.

The esteemed Columbia University sociologist Dr. Herbert Gans put it this way, in his legendary 1965 book, “The Levittowners”: “Experience with residential integration in many communities, including Levittown, indicates that it can be achieved without problems when the two races are similar in socio-economic level and in the visible cultural aspects of class.”

By announcing his tester initiative, Cuomo could well be said to have been channeling Gans: “If we want to be what we say we want to be, an integrated community where we all live together and we all love one another, then, by definition you have to have a housing market that allows people to live wherever they want to live.” He might have added, of course, wherever they can afford to live, but that’s exactly what the state’s teams will be looking for. Still, the Cuomo approach is a sharp and welcome contrast with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s affordable housing philosophy, which seeks to use extensive subsidies to guarantee economic integration, rather than accepting the fact that neighborhoods differ by income.

The implied lesson of the Cuomo housing discrimination plan is that Americans of any background should be able move from one neighborhood to another as their economic situation improves. The federal government should take notes.

Howard Husock is the vice president for research and publications at the Manhattan Institute.