Publications on Racial Segregation

Historically, residential segregation constrained where minorities could live, contributing to disparities in education, employment, and wealth. Researchers interested in the well-being and future prospects of low-income working families have not yet explored how their residential patterns may vary across racial and ethnic lines or considered the implications of these patterns. Therefore, this paper explores differences in neighborhood characteristics among white, black, and Hispanic low-income working families. The findings suggest that policies aimed at reducing the persistent disadvantages facing minority low-income working families need to address the ways the neighborhoods in which minorities live may be compounding these disadvantages.

The Urban Institute Press invites you to a panel discussion about a new book -- Public Housing and the Legacy of Segregation -- that explores the aftermath of racial discrimination and segregation and its implications for poor families and their children. Can public housing policies simultaneously address the problems of poverty and race? If so, how?

The flow of ideas between the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) includes approaches to housing policy, as the public sectors in both countries have turned toward the private sector to help provide affordable housing and support redevelopment activities. The Urban Institute and the Institute for Community Cohesion developed an innovative program of work to compare approaches to community revitalization, community cohesion and sustainable neighborhoods in cities across both countries. Ultimately, the purpose of the project is to influence policy and practice agendas in the UK and US by highlighting effective strategies for revitalizing communities and building community cohesion. This report describes the project, discusses contextual differences between the two countries that affect subsidized housing, and highlights lessons drawn from the exchanges that took place during the spring and summer of 2008.

Urban Institute researchers and a dozen contributors explore how public housing reform policies could overcome the persistent disadvantages facing black communities and black families and whether ignoring these disadvantages may undermine the long-term vision for public housing's transformation. Authors recount the history of racial segregation in public housing, highlight the consequences, and debate remedies.

For the past two decades the United States has been transforming distressed public housing communities, with three ambitious goals: replace distressed developments with healthy mixed-income communities; help residents relocate to affordable housing, often in the private market; and empower former public housing families toward economic self-sufficiency. The transformation has focused on deconcentrating poverty, but not on the underlying role of racial segregation in creating these distressed communities. In Public Housing and the Legacy of Segregation, scholars and public housing officials assess whether—and how—public housing policies can simultaneously address the problems of poverty and race.