Housing Discrimination Is Due to Misdistribution of Opportunities as Well as Racism, Leadership Council Report Says

“The Chicago regional housing market continues to skew access to opportunities for different groups, due to overt discrimination and to the poor distribution of housing opportunities in community areas across the region,” the Leadership Council on Metropolitan Open Communities’ long-awaited report concludes.

Entitled The Segregation of Opportunities: The Structure of Advantage and Disadvantage in the Chicago Region, the report reinforces the need for much of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law’s recent fair housing advocacy (the Shriver Center often works in tandem with the Leadership Council). Together with partners at the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota and the Kirwan Institute on Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, the Leadership Council’s John Lukehart authored the report.

The Leadership Council based its report on an “Opportunity Index” designed for them in 2001 by john powell, the noted academic and director of Ohio State’s Kirwan Institute. Professor powell chose numerous variables in four broad categories to measure a neighborhood’s access to opportunities: (1) transportation and jobs (e.g., proximity to jobs in a 10-mile radius); (2) education (e.g., graduation rate); (3) “quality of life” (e.g., crime rate); and (4) access to municipal services (e.g., day care slots). He then “scored” each variable and designed formulas for summarizing each category and for an overall “Opportunity Index” quantifying the neighborhood’s opportunities.

From this foundation the Leadership Council began to analyze who has access to opportunities in metropolitan Chicago. While the report cites some progress in battling housing discrimination in the real estate market, it has several troubling findings, including:

• Low-income families have access to very few units in “high-opportunity” neighborhoods. In fact, for families earning $25,525 per year, 87 percent of the housing they can afford is in “low-opportunity” neighborhoods. Conversely, limited-income families can afford less than 4 percent of the housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods.
• Race is a factor: 94 percent of African American residents and 83 percent of Latino residents live in low-opportunity communities, while high-opportunity neighborhoods contain only 3 percent African American and 4 percent Latino families, respectively.
• Families who lived in the “highest-opportunity” community had access to 34 times as many jobs created in a 10-mile radius (from 1995 to 2000) as the “lowest-opportunity” community. Similarly the lowest-opportunity community has a total tax capacity less than one-third the size of the highest-opportunity community.
• High- and low-opportunity communities mirror these disparities in terms of several quality-of-life measures.

“Our report highlights that housing discrimination isn’t limited to overtly racist acts,” says the Leadership Council’s Rob Breymaier, “but that there are structural factors that together conspire to discriminate, including state tax policy, land use and zoning, public and private investment decisions, and our governance structure.”

These striking findings highlight the overwhelming need for the Shriver Center’s fair housing work, including the Shriver Center’s campaign (with key allies including the Leadership Council) to amend the Illinois Human Rights Act to prohibit discrimination on the basis of a family’s legal source of income. If the Illinois General Assembly adopts the Source-of-Income Amendment, families with a variety of reliable but nonwage income (including disability income and Housing Choice Vouchers) could access available housing in many high-opportunity communities. The Shriver Center also works with the Chicago Housing Authority to improve access to high-opportunity areas for former Chicago Housing Authority residents through the “Enhanced Housing Opportunities Program,” part of the Wallace v. Chicago Housing Authority settlement. Through such advocacy, the Shriver Center strives to work with allies to bridge the gap between families and more opportunities.