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Chapter 9 Open Housing, Closed Court, 1970-79 The Policy Failures in Housing Nate Jones described the legal and political situation after the Supreme Court's ruling in the Dayton case in the summer of 1977: "We're in the trenches just fighting to survive. At issue is whether we can even keep the Second Reconstruction alive." Jones and the school segregation cases were not alone in that trench. Program initiatives and legal challenges seeking to breach the color line in housing were under almost as severe attack. The challenges to school and housing segregation shared a common goal: to raise an issue that the majority would just as soon ignore, whether a caste system of racial ghettoization divided metropolitan America. For a time, it appeared that the Nixon administration might confront the issue in the context of federal housing programs. In 1969 the secretary of housing and urban development, George Romney, announced an "open communities " policy. It promised minorities real access to housing and the expanding job opportunities in the suburbs and exurbs from which they had been historically excluded. In March of 1970, President Nixon announced his support of this policy while promoting "neighborhood schools" and opposing "forced busing." Equal housing access could then serve as a program to show that the administration did not favor segregation, but just opposed busing. In this context, Nixon promised "free choice," including both "the right to choose, and the ability to choose. The right to move out of a mid-city slum means little without the means of doing so." Romney then sought to use HUD funding and programs as a lever to end racial exclusion from white residential areas such as Warren, Michigan. In April, Nixon backed this rhetoric in his second annual report of national housing goals by conceding that racial discrimination was a motivating factor in white suburban opposition to subsidized housing. The president urged that ,'all Americans, regardless of race or economic status, are entitled to share" in the abundant land available in the burgeoning suburbs for residential use. But when whites expressed their hostility to association with blacks in the same neighborhoods (and hence in the same schools), Nixon directed Romney to scrap the open communities policy. In December of 1970 President Nixon announced at a televised news conference: "I believe that forced integration of the suburbs is not in the national interest." He adopted as his new "basic principle" that no municipality should have federally assisted housing "imposed from Washington by bureaucratic fiat." Although he encouraged "voluntary " local efforts, he refused to withhold federal housing assistance and 183 184 Beyond Busing community development funds from all-white local jurisdictions that intended to remain that way. Nixon conceded that this political response amounted to an abdication of federal responsibility for segregation in his next annual report on national housing goals: Residential separation of racial minorities was, and is, another characteristic of the social environment which has been influenced by federal housing policy. [For example,] until 1949, FHA officially sanctioned and perpetuated community patterns of residential separation based on race by refusing to insure mortgages in neighborhoods not racially homogenous . The effects of this policy have persisted for many years after its reversal and are still evident in metropolitan areas today. While the president proclaimed HUD programs should be used to expand housing opportunities for all Americans, federally subsidized "scattered site" housing programs continued on a dual basis-white families "sited" in identifiably white areas, black families in black areas. Nixon then imposed a moratorium on all federally subsidized housing on January 7, 1973. Shortly thereafter, he announced that the urban crisis was over. Nevertheless, Romney continued to stump the country in vain for metropolitan solutions to the problems of the "real city," the central city and its surrounding urbanized area. HUD's own administrative rules also continued to use actual "housing market areas" coincident with entire metropolitan regions as the proper measure for considering "project selection criteria," including "minority housing opportunities." HUD's areawide, open housing criteria existed only on paper, however, not in the policy and practices of the administration. Congress responded to Nixon's default in housing by consolidating all federal housing and community development programs and funding under a "block grant" or "special revenue sharing" approach. As one of its goals, the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 spoke boldly of twoway integration of housing on both sides of the color line. The act promised to reduce the "isolation" of poor persons...

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