Money often can segregate much of Houston
Civic leaders love to talk about how Houston is a city of opportunity. It’s on banners at the airport. It’s been used to sell the General Plan. The Greater Houston Partnership uses it as a tagline. Mayor Sylvester Turner used the word “opportunity” five times in his inauguration speech last year.
But opportunity for whom, exactly?
Opportunity for businesspeople and entrepreneurs, certainly. Houston prides itself on having low taxes and loose regulation, access to international markets, and all the other resources that help private enterprise grow and thrive.
Whether Houston offers opportunity for people who don’t have much to start with, however — that’s less clear. Turner’s decision to block a subsidized housing development in a well-todo neighborhood near the Galleria certainly raises that question: The federal government said the decision-making process violated the Civil Rights Act, my colleague Rebecca Elliott reported.
Turner’s response? “I do not believe that only wealthy areas can provide what our children need,” he said in a statement. “I have chosen to stay in the neighborhood where I grew up, and I will not tell children in similar communities they must live somewhere else.”
Of course, communities projecting the appearance of decay and neglect can also offer networks of support. Those neighborhoods deserve great schools and jobs and access to healthy groceries just as much as rich ones do.
The problem is, they often don’t offer those things right now, and the research is getting increasingly clear that kids do better if they grow up in wealthier areas. The younger they move, the better, to maximize access to better schools, low crime rates and a vision of economic success that seems achievable rather than remote.
Turner says that families should be able to live in different kinds of neighborhoods. But as the five-month investigation by the federal department of Housing and Urban Development found,
out of 91 projects the city allowed to move forward with low-income housing tax credits, 85 percent were in council districts with a non-white majority population. The rest tended to be for elderly residents, which do not serve families with young children.
“The evidence indicates that the city’s process for approving and siting LIHTC developments reinforces and perpetuates existing patterns of segregation,” wrote Garry Sweeney, director of the HUD’s Fort Worth office for fair housing and equal opportunity.
That makes it less likely that kids in public housing will graduate from college and earn more money than their parents — exactly the type of opportunity that Houston supposedly promotes.
And Houston has a lot of work to do in this regard. It’s the third most economically segregated city in the nation, according to the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. Researchers from Harvard and the University of California-Berkeley found Harris County is worse than 65 percent of counties when it comes to income mobility for poor kids.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that the Texas state government had pushed too many low income tax credit projects to minority neighborhoods. Housing advocacy groups warned Turner in April that opposing the project near the Galleria, 2640 Fountain View, would put the city in violation of federal housing law. Take a look at housing developments overlaid on a map of racial concentration, like this one from the city’s 2015 analysis of impediments to fair housing:
The specific rationale that Turner offered in blocking the Fountain View project, cost per unit, was refuted by the HUD letter, which said the city has approved projects at similar expense in poorer neighborhoods.
In reality, HUDargued that the development was scuttled simply because of the opposition of wealthy residents who, as the letter documented, didn’t want poor kids going to school with their own.