Writing in 1960 for Esquire, James Baldwin described the damage done by New York City’s racial segregation practices, particularly the desolation of the Riverton housing project. The state of housing segregation in Seattle today is a long way from the dire straits of black housing in Baldwin’s Harlem. Particularly striking, though, is Baldwin’s contrasting of the white, wealthy Fifth Avenue downtown and Fifth Avenue in Harlem. To some extent, this juxtaposition should feel familiar to Seattle’s minority communities today, who live in the shadow of an economic boom in which they do not and have not historically shared.
In this paper, I argue for the use of a disparate impact evidentiary standard in identifying housing discrimination in Seattle. …show more content…
The Kirwan Institute’s mapping of its Comprehensive Access to Opportunity Index, which is comprised of five sub-measures including quality of education, economic health, neighborhood quality, transportation, and environmental and health factors, shows those areas of the Central Puget Sound region in which the highest concentration of minorities reside have the lowest level of access to opportunity. In this sense, the forces that confine low-income minorities in low-opportunity areas are self-replicating. George Galster posits that a self-reinforcing dynamic has developed in which the problems associated with ghettoization serve to justify, in the minds of whites, self-segregation. Minorities living within poverty-stricken racially homogenous neighborhoods are deprived of the opportunities available elsewhere, and make what Galster terms “contextually rational choices.” These behavioral adaptations are in turn used as rationalizations for the self-segregation of whites. The process exacerbates the poor quality and lack of funding in underprivileged school districts, and manifests in exclusionary zoning policies and housing codes as whites seeks to put up barriers against the ills of poverty-stricken …show more content…
I make this conceptual distinction to draw out the need for broader structural change in addressing residential segregation. As previously discussed, predicted racial/ethnic composition ratios demonstrate that segregation patterns are not entirely due to income differences among racial groups. Still, economic disparities between racial groups likely remains the largest barrier to integration and housing equity. African-Americans in the Puget Sound region earn between a third to half of what non-Hispanic whites earn. A 2010 study found that close to 35 percent of Seattle-area black renters and over 25 percent of black homeowners paid more than half of their income to for housing, compared to less than 20 percent of white renters and 12 percent of white homeowners. This disparity is becoming more dire as area rental price continue to rise
In this paper, I argue for the use of a disparate impact evidentiary standard in identifying housing discrimination in Seattle. …show more content…
The Kirwan Institute’s mapping of its Comprehensive Access to Opportunity Index, which is comprised of five sub-measures including quality of education, economic health, neighborhood quality, transportation, and environmental and health factors, shows those areas of the Central Puget Sound region in which the highest concentration of minorities reside have the lowest level of access to opportunity. In this sense, the forces that confine low-income minorities in low-opportunity areas are self-replicating. George Galster posits that a self-reinforcing dynamic has developed in which the problems associated with ghettoization serve to justify, in the minds of whites, self-segregation. Minorities living within poverty-stricken racially homogenous neighborhoods are deprived of the opportunities available elsewhere, and make what Galster terms “contextually rational choices.” These behavioral adaptations are in turn used as rationalizations for the self-segregation of whites. The process exacerbates the poor quality and lack of funding in underprivileged school districts, and manifests in exclusionary zoning policies and housing codes as whites seeks to put up barriers against the ills of poverty-stricken …show more content…
I make this conceptual distinction to draw out the need for broader structural change in addressing residential segregation. As previously discussed, predicted racial/ethnic composition ratios demonstrate that segregation patterns are not entirely due to income differences among racial groups. Still, economic disparities between racial groups likely remains the largest barrier to integration and housing equity. African-Americans in the Puget Sound region earn between a third to half of what non-Hispanic whites earn. A 2010 study found that close to 35 percent of Seattle-area black renters and over 25 percent of black homeowners paid more than half of their income to for housing, compared to less than 20 percent of white renters and 12 percent of white homeowners. This disparity is becoming more dire as area rental price continue to rise