Owen Fiss, A Way Out

Responses by Robert Coles, Richard Ford, Steven Gregory, Jennifer Rothschild, Tracey L. Meares, Gary Orfield, Alexander Polikoff, James E. Rosenbaum, Jim Sleeper, and J. Phillip Thompson. Edited by Joshua Cohen, Jefferson Decker, and Joel Rogers. Princeton University Press, 2003. 144 pages, hardcover. $19.95.

The field of planning has traditionally split into two camps over how to address the problems of impoverished neighborhoods – poverty-level households, lack of jobs, overburdened social institutions, and the prevalence of gang and criminal activity. One side favors people-based strategies, such as services and training that invest directly in individuals or households; the other favors place-based strategies, such as creating redevelopment areas, razing blighted neighborhoods, or instituting economic development zones. In a recently republished essay, Owen Fiss weighs in on the people/place tension, and at the same time revives a policy debate that has been largely dormant for the past 25 years–what do we do about America’s ghettoes? The Princeton University Press volume adds eleven responses to Fiss’s original piece from a range of viewpoints.

Fiss, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale University, argues that place-based strategies cannot rectify the concentration of the black underclass in impoverished communities. Because he sees limited opportunity for residents to exit these neighborhoods and their cumulative problems, Fiss demands nothing less than eliminating the ghetto as a component of American life. He presents a bold thesis: each resident must be given the economic means to move to a “better neighborhood.”

Urban renewal–community development programs that address issues of blight and underdevelopment, typically in urban areas–is the classic place-based strategy. It began with federally-funded postwar city rebuilding efforts: legislation in the 1930s and ‘40s funded slum clearance and redevelopment for the provision of public housing units and other uses. The Housing Act of 1954 expanded the eligibility to areas in the process of deterioration, not just those already experiencing slum conditions. It also required those proposing redevelopment activity to plan broadly for overall neighborhood impact in a process that involved community residents. Since the 1960s, however, critics of these programs have grown in number and strength, leading to diminished federal investment in impoverished communities.

Urban renewal fell into disfavor partly because of its negative social impacts. Physical blight often masked low-income but tightly knit, well-functioning communities. Urban renewal programs aimed to stabilize such areas, but historically, they catalyzed neighborhood change via invasion and succession, destroying the existing social ties that enriched the neighborhood. Without these social ties, neighbors no longer stepped in to address issues of local deviance or disorder, nor assist one another.

Additionally, most revitalization programs ignored how residents define their own neighborhoods. In his classic study of Italian-Americans by Herbert Gans found that working-class families in Boston’s West End didn’t consider their community a single neighborhood at all: they identified sub-areas with different ethnic groups. In the 1980s, Chicago Mayor Harold Washington proposed incorporating neighborhood issue advocates into city government, but could reach no agreement as to what constituted a neighborhood. Defining “blight” itself is equally problematic. The working-class West Ender families resented the implication that they were slum dwellers. Generally, federal housing laws and redevelopment standards reflected middle-class tastes and the aspirations of local boosters. Definitions of “blighted” areas assumed that suburban living represented a universal ideal, ignoring other residential preferences.

Fiss begins by explaining how racial prejudice rendered blacks virtually unable to attain middle-class status in the U.S., concentrating them in dismal conditions in cities. Early agricultural migrants lacked financial resources, employable skills for an urban economy, and education. Local and national government actions, too, hindered black mobility: discriminatory zoning and Federal Housing Authority standards promoted residential segregation. Moreover, the segregation of schools assured inferior educations, and thus inferior options.

Fiss acknowledges that the growth of the economy and civil rights successes, including fair employment laws and affirmative action, facilitated mobility for some, helping a black middle class emerge. Yet when those few blacks left the ghetto, conditions were far worse for those left behind. Their departure prompted a parallel exodus of neighborhood jobs, and jobs outside the community required difficult commutes and often a different set of skills. The resulting widespread joblessness meant little or no income for ghetto residents and lowered self-esteem, yielding boredom instead of a lifestyle characterized by discipline and hope. Social institutions weakened, community norms changed, and schools became overburdened. Support systems like churches, family, and friends which had previously helped make ghetto life tolerable were similarly hobbled by the middle-class exodus. The only social institution to fare well in the ghetto, according to Fiss, is the gang.

Recent efforts have largely failed, in Fiss’s view, when ghetto residents are forced to remain in their impoverished conditions. Welfare-to-work programs offer low wages and limited futures, and educational benefits, even from the broadly lauded Head Start program, have been shown to fade without ongoing reinforcement. Fiss also finds it unlikely that a modern version of the New Deal Era’s Works Project Administration, supported by William Julius Wilson and other scholars of urban life as a way to create jobs and restore confidence, can overcome years of joblessness. Fiss’s ghetto is a social structure, not merely a geographical location, making any place-based strategy doomed to fail.

Fiss’s alternative – providing every resident an opportunity to move elsewhere – goes beyond well-intentioned social policy and planning, he says, and begins to chip away at the subjugation of inner city ghettoes. Doing so would bring residences closer to jobs, disperse the concentrated pockets of impoverished single parent households, take advantage of less heavily burdened schools and other social institutions, and provide a sense of opportunity.

To implement this, Fiss suggests using public and perhaps foundation funds to form an agency to facilitate mass relocation, subsidizing rent for relocated households and strictly enforcing antidiscrimination laws. Using a recent HUD pilot program as a guideline, Fiss estimates that this program would cost $50 billion per year.

His ideas are not entirely new. A 30-year-old Chicago-area court case, Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), makes a compelling case for Fiss’s argument. In 1966, the Illinois chapter of the ACLU filed two lawsuits alleging racial discrimination by the CHA, charging that virtually all public housing sites were selected to avoid placing black families in white neighborhoods. In 1969, a federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the CHA to supply scattered-site public housing throughout the city, including white neighborhoods. In 1971, the U.S. Court of Appeals sustained the ruling and found that, since the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) local jurisdiction encompassed the entire Chicago metropolitan area, including the suburbs, the remedy for past discrimination ought to be expanded beyond city limits. In response, HUD adapted its Section 8 rent-subsidy program to help public-housing residents move into private housing in wealthier areas of the city and suburbs. Since 1976, more than 5,000 households have relocated to more than 100 communities in six counties. Children who moved to middle-class neighborhoods had a lower incidence of behavioral problems, and adults, and later their children, were more likely to be employed.

Alexander Polikoff, one of the respondents to Fiss in the new volume, was the lead ACLU attorney in the Gautreaux case and the author of a book that essentially argued Fiss’s current case. Polikoff is now somewhat critical of Fiss’s idea: he notes that creating housing opportunities in the U.S. was not as effective during the late-1960s and early-‘70s as other equal rights efforts such as voting and school desegregation. He agrees with the merit of rent subsidy programs to broaden housing opportunities, and with the choice Fiss wants to provide to every ghetto resident. But he finds Fiss’s arguments “disappointing” for not analyzing the opportunities afforded for black advancement through the electoral system.

Other respondents take issue with Fiss’s concept of the ghetto. Steven Gregory, Director of Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies, argues that Fiss bases his analysis on naïve stereotypes of black inner city residents unsupported by rigorous methodology. Gregory also finds the analysis ignorant of the historical work of blacks to define the problems and solutions within their own communities.

Other critics agree with Fiss’s view of the problems facing ghetto residents, but feel the remedy is politically or financially infeasible. Richard Ford, law professor at Stanford University, argues that those worst off are unlikely to take advantage of any relocation program, or even succeed at relocation if they do participate. He also cautions that public jurisdictions have and likely will continue to use legal land use options, such as limiting low-density development and public transit, to restrict low-income residency. Tracy L. Meares, law professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a member of a family relocated under Gautreaux, speaks from experience about the prejudice and harassment relocated households have faced. Ford, Meares, and others advocate a less ambitious and perhaps more pragmatic spectrum of solutions including improved schools and college funding for qualified ghetto youth, transit from impoverished communities to outlying jobs, increased availability of quality daycare for low-income working households, better policing of poor neighborhoods, and increased homeownership assistance for minority households in gentrifying neighborhoods.

Fiss’s proposal is truly ambitious, perhaps too ambitious for the reality of urban public policy in a country where race and class divisions still have political currency. In an era of increasingly limited resources, there is much greater support for capital programs–the bricks and mortar development of affordable housing, for example, public or otherwise–than for voucher programs that provide short-term assistance and no concrete monument to community. Demand for subsidized housing, including the housing in the impoverished neighborhoods Fiss decries, is typically so high that waiting lists run several years. Landlords elsewhere are often uninterested in renting to very low-income households because they can find higher-income tenants in tight rental markets. Even many “liberal” communities fail to support programs for their most disadvantaged residents.

One may also question Fiss’s implicit assertion that the black underclass is the only population to suffer from long-term government policies. How do we compensate Native Americans for centuries of subjugation? What about relocation options for working-class homeowners in declining inner ring suburbs?

Despite its impracticality, A Way Out provides a provocative discussion accessible to both policy scholars and concerned residents. Fiss is brave to outline a no-holds-barred solution to a continuing problem. Many of his critics make valid points–and one doubts whether Fiss himself truly believes a proposal to spend $50 billion per year to relocate minority ghetto households to tightly guarded middle-class enclaves will succeed. No matter though, because this series of essays finally revives a critical conversation after more than a quarter of a century.

REFERENCES

Gans, Herbert J. The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans. New York: The Free Press, 1962.

Giloth, Robert. “Social Justice and Neighborhood Revitalization in Chicago: The Era of Harold Washington, 1983-1987.” Revitalizing Urban Neighborhoods. Keating, W. Dennis, Norman Krumholz, and Philip Star, eds. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1996.

Katz, Michael B. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America. New York: Basic Books, 1996.

Keating, W. Dennis and Janet Smith. “Neighborhoods in Transition.” Revitalizing Urban Neighborhoods. Keating, W. Dennis, Norman Krumholz, and Philip Star, eds. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1996.

O’Connor, Alice. “Swimming Against the Tide: A Brief History of Federal Policy in Poor Communities.” Urban Problems and Community Development. Ferguson, Ronald F. and William T. Dickens, eds. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press; Katz, 1999.

So, Frank S. The Practice of Local Government Planning. 2nd edition. Washington, D.C.: International City/County Management Association, 1988.