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Ask HN: Disrupting housing segregation in the US?

3 points| charlescearl | 9 years ago | reply

The impact of housing and educational segregation based on race and ethnicity in the US have been documented and debated for over a century[1]. Is there any technology or processes that might be a game changer here?

I realize that the HN community is no doubt divided on whether racial segregation is a good thing or not -- and it is good that it is debated in a thoughtful and rigorous fashion.

But in this question I look at the impact on my immediate community [2] in terms of class and economic mobility, and think that there must be some disruptive approaches that can be explored.

As HUD looses it's bite [3] what's next? An AirBnB for achieving integrated neighborhoods? An app to suss out red lining? Curious.

I realize that this is a US-biased question. Also curious to know if there are lessons and struggles to learn from globally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_segregation_in_the_United_States

[2] https://southernspaces.org/2015/segregations-new-geography-atlanta-metro-region-race-and-declining-prospects-upward-mobility

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/politics/ben-carson-housing-urban-development-trump.html

3 comments

order
[+] tbihl|9 years ago|reply
I'm going to try to keep this brief in the hope that it will come off as a few things worth responding to, rather than just signaling:

1. If you haven't read Jane Jacob's "Death and Life of Great American Cities", it's so important that it's almost worth putting everything else about this project on hold. It offers explanations of why people flee areas, the mechanics of slum formation and revival, and a lot of other things that would give you a different perspective.

2. On a national level, probably the best action we could take against disjointed, segregated housing and towns would be to entirely rid ourselves of FHA loans. They make it extremely difficult for small-scale developers to compete with rent-seeking speculators who build huge buildings and complexes. For problems with those places, refer back to (1).

3. The article you cited about Atlanta mentioned that whites are moving into the city center and into exurbs, while blacks are moving to the places in between. This looks to me like two different patterns. The first is the resurgence of cities you see all across the country. The second is that suburban whites are fleeing the 1st and 2nd generation suburbs in favor of new ones. The inherent instability and insolvency of these car dependent subrubs mean that you can only do well in them if you stay ahead of the wave of decay that comes as maintenance bills come due and stores move out. For more about this Ponzi scheme, I recommend Strong Towns (strongtowns.org).

As I hopefully implied earlier, I'd be happy to dive deeper if anything here piqued your interest.

[+] EleventhSun|9 years ago|reply
- Add an upper bound to the number of investment properties someone can own. Owning more than one or two is clearly parasitic behavior. Banning this parasitic behavior allows breathing room for minorities to get onto the property ladder.

- Add tax subsidies to encourage employees working from home. This will help stop gentrification, etc, since developers can work from unconventional neighborhoods more easily, and also means that employees don't have to pay extortionary rent/interest for housing.