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Ben Carson’s Warped View of Housing
Ben Carson’s Warped View of Housing
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD DEC. 19, 2016
Antigovernment ideologues resent the Department of Housing and Urban Development even when they know nothing about it. Ben Carson, Donald Trump’s choice to run HUD, is a fine case in point.
Last year, Mr. Carson accused the agency of “social engineering” for requiring state and local governments that receive federal housing money to stop dumping subsidized housing in poor neighborhoods and instead locate some of that housing in healthier neighborhoods where residents would have access to transportation, jobs and decent schools. His comment betrayed a distressing ignorance of HUD’s mission, the laws under which it is supposed to operate and, more broadly, the history of housing segregation in the United States.
What triggered his outburst was the administration’s decision — long overdue — to begin paying attention to the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and its mandate to “affirmatively further” fair housing goals. Among other things, this meant making a good-faith effort to break down patterns of racial and economic segregation that, perversely enough, had been promoted by the government itself.
Research shows that integrating poorer families into healthier, mixed-income neighborhoods has improved prospects for them and their children. A prominent Harvard study last year found that young children whose families had been given housing vouchers to move to better neighborhoods were more likely to attend college — and to attend better colleges — than other children, and had significantly higher incomes as adults. This form of economic integration could be crucial to breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty.
By describing efforts to achieve integration as “social engineering,” Mr. Carson seemed to suggest that segregation was a natural element of civic life. It is, in fact, very much the consequence of decades of federal policies. Chief of among these was the system of private mortgages guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration, which did much from the 1930s to the 1960s to promote homeownership for white Americans. But the agency discriminated against black citizens, as a matter of policy, and insisted on black-white separation in housing.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was supposed to end all that. But meeting fair housing goals has been well down the priority list of most housing secretaries, and the rules have been spottily enforced.
One important thing for Mr. Carson to understand is that enforcing the law, and making sure that state and local governments actively pursue economic integration, will help whites as well. Low-income whites make up more than a third of the 4.6 million poor families that receive housing assistance through HUD. They will also benefit from broader access to housing in healthier communities with better schools and job opportunities.
That point is beginning to hit home with both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. The House speaker, Paul Ryan, in an antipoverty plan he released in June, called on the government to make housing assistance vouchers portable so that recipients could move “up the economic ladder” by moving to places with better education and job opportunities. Last summer, both houses approved a bill that insulates low-income families from rent increases that could push them into homelessness and also expands their access to housing, jobs and schools in mixed-income areas. The Senate blocked a bill that would have stopped HUD from enforcing the rule requiring it to pursue fair housing goals.
If confirmed, Mr. Carson would be bound to enforce the Fair Housing Act. If HUD under his leadership failed to meet its legal responsibilities, it could be hauled into federal court, as has happened several times in the past. Still, the danger is that Mr. Carson could send the message that it is again perfectly fine for governments around the country to return to a policy of racial isolation. Unless he changes his views, he is a poor choice to run this agency.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.