We need to know where we live in order to imagine living elsewhere. –Avery Gordon
The contemporary housing system in the U.S. was built on a model of growth and exclusion that has generally ensured returns on investment for homeowners at the cost of renters and low-income households, disproportionately affecting Black and brown communities. Even if there were racial parity in terms of homeownership, the lingering impacts of racial segregation and strategic disinvestment would inhibit the type of wealth accumulation that benefited white homeowners after World War II.
As the aging housing stock in this country becomes increasingly unaffordable and vulnerable to climate risks, advancing racial equity in the housing system can feel like an insurmountable challenge, especially given the current attacks from the federal government aiming to dismantle decades of progress and support.
For the past 20 years, many jurisdictions have focused on incremental strategies to widen access to the benefits of the existing housing system. Until recently, policymakers and housing advocates interested in advancing housing equity could employ interventions that indirectly supported communities of color. These policies often relied on tools such as opportunity maps or well-crafted proxies to identify disadvantaged communities without using race-based language. However, under the current administration, public entities and institutions are more vulnerable to scrutiny regardless of how they frame their efforts.
Paradoxically, as the current administration guts public funding for housing and attacks DEI, now may be a time to think more strategically about housing justice models. If incremental strategies are more likely to fail, rethinking the housing system and making sure to document and articulate the history of harms may become increasingly important in laying the groundwork for the future, when the causes of these harms can once again be freely addressed. Regardless of how advocates decide to proceed, it is helpful to be able to clearly define the problem they are trying to solve and what that means for putting specific strategies into practice.
What Does Racial Equity Mean in Housing? Three Definitional Frameworks
For housing justice and racial equity advocates, it’s a challenge to identify strategies that effectively increase access to stable housing and wealth-building for communities that have been excluded from housing opportunities. Part of the challenge is that local governments generally lack the funding or authority to work at the scale needed. However, an equally important challenge stems from the confused way in which some approaches seek to take advantage of existing inequalities in the housing system, while others try to eliminate them. Most interventions can be categorized into one of three frameworks. Defining the scope and limitations of each framework can help map out how different approaches can be operationalized.
Some approaches seek to take advantage of existing inequalities in the housing system, while others try to eliminate them.”
Inclusive Framework: One approach to housing justice is to consider racial equity in housing as an effort to increase access to or inclusion in the existing housing systems. This “inclusion-based” frame identifies ways to broaden access to housing benefits for a particular community. For racial equity proponents using this framework, this tends to mean working to overcome hurdles that impede access to housing benefits for a particular population, such as:
- trying to desegregate neighborhoods and increase access of low-income, renter households to well-resourced neighborhoods;
- removing lending or rental barriers that disproportionately limit housing access for households of color by eliminating underwriting and application screening criteria that are overly restrictive or replicate existing inequities; and
- enacting robust anti-discrimination laws and enforcement mechanisms that seek to limit multiple forms of discrimination in private housing markets.
Transformative Framework: Even if Black and brown households were equitably represented in terms of homeownership rates, wealth from home equity, or in the various markets and fields that produce and finance housing, they would continue to be negatively affected by a U.S. housing system that relies on a growth and exclusion model to ensure a return on investment. So another way to think about advancing racial equity in housing is how to make the overall housing system more just, and to reduce the reliance on housing as an accumulation or wealth-building strategy. This lens tends to focus on housing as a social good through a variety of strategies that include:
- promoting land trusts, social housing, or a renewed investment in government-subsidized or -owned housing;
- pushing for tenant protections, rent stabilization/control, or mandatory housing registries that allow the state to play a larger role in regulating private market rental housing; and
- advocating for tax reforms that eliminate subsidies of affluence, such as the mortgage interest deduction, which taxpayers with incomes over $100,000 receive 90 percent of the benefit of.
Reparative Framework: A third approach is to try to remedy past harms by identifying specific discriminatory practices and the communities harmed by them and then creating targeted programs to repair those harms. These efforts involve documenting historical harms and engaging communities affected by those harms in developing policies or programs that aim to close the specific gaps, such as
- housing preference programs targeted to communities displaced by redlining or redevelopment; and
- financial assistance programs (e.g., downpayment assistance) that target communities displaced by redlining, redevelopment, and discriminatory lending practices.
Intersecting Frameworks: Managing Tensions and Tradeoffs—These definitional frameworks can align, but they are often in tension. For example, a policy that seeks to increase access to homeownership and reduce wealth gaps among Black and brown communities often also seeks to take advantage of the capital gains of homeownership, which depend on housing scarcity and may fail in a community where infrastructure investments are not made and property values are stagnant or declining. Alternatively, projects such as land trusts are often criticized because they can be small in scale and limit potential profits, preventing their beneficiaries from accumulating some of the wealth that other demographic groups have gotten from homeownership.
[RELATED ARTICLE: Is the Housing Market the Answer to the Racial Wealth Gap?]
In order to effectively navigate these tensions, two things are critical. The first is getting input from intended beneficiaries about their priorities, and the second is having clarity about what types of opportunities the framework promotes and how these frameworks are put into practice.
Like all communities, Black and brown communities are diverse, and what the residents want should inform the strategies. It is vitally important to understand the needs and wants of specific communities to determine which definition of racial equity in housing should be centered on. Ensuring that policies and programs benefit communities of color who face disproportionate barriers to housing additionally requires robust community engagement in their design and implementation. For example, a policy that could be beneficial to low-income households, implemented by an institution that has no relationship or trust with Black residents, may unintentionally result in increasing racial inequity, even if it reduces broader housing inequality by income.
Operationalizing Racial Equity
No single intervention is guaranteed to have a meaningful impact on racial equity in housing. Instead, many pathways can improve racial equity for specific communities. And there are a variety of policies that can reduce the inequities that housing depends on. Deciding how and when to act should be informed by identifying the interventions best suited to address the housing challenges specific communities face and identifying the policies that will withstand legal challenges. Most housing is privately developed, owned, and operated—including most housing occupied by Black and brown households—and government-funded programs often struggle to reach and meaningfully affect the private markets where most people are housed. Understanding regulatory enforcement mechanisms and incentives for compliance may influence how much access can be shifted, particularly in a volatile political environment.
Paying attention to the operational components of policies is essential for equitable outcomes. This attention must start with looking at who is involved in the policy development and implementation, and how government actors are held accountable to various communities. Each definition of housing equity brings its own challenges and opportunities.
Inclusive Strategies
Inclusivehousing strategies include a wide range of approaches to increase access to housing opportunities within the current system. They often involve race-neutral policies with carefully crafted proxies to achieve racial equity goals while navigating legal constraints.
Perhaps the most well-studied example of inclusive strategies is the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment, which moved public housing residents from high-poverty to low-poverty neighborhoods. The program successfully relocated thousands of families from low-income communities facing disinvestment into communities with higher incomes and more amenities.
Research on the outcomes of MTO participants indicated mixed and complicated results: While adult participants generally had improved physical health, there was no improvement for children. For children under 13, there were long-term economic gains, but not for older children or adults. Academic improvement for children also varied depending on the child’s age, and female children generally experienced better mental health outcomes while male children generally did not.
Moving to Opportunity demonstrates the limitations of race-neutral approaches to address the problem of inequitable access. While it improved access to housing opportunities for a limited number of beneficiaries, it did not take into account the discrimination that its Black participants would face in their new surroundings. Other inclusive strategies fall short on racial equity because their race-neutral approaches miss race-specific barriers to access, and end up disproportionately underserving households of color, which can actually worsen racial equity.
Although racially neutral language may make them politically viable, it also dilutes their impact on racial disparities. Furthermore, these strategies typically don’t challenge the structural racism and wealth-accumulation principles underlying housing inequities.
Despite these limitations, inclusive strategies remain valuable for their political feasibility and ability to create immediate housing access for families, while also building public support and institutional capacity that can serve as stepping stones toward more comprehensive approaches to housing justice.
Transformative Strategies
Transformative strategies focus on fundamentally altering how housing is provided, owned, and controlled. One example of a transformative strategy is embodied by the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC) in California. EB PREC works to permanently remove housing from the speculative market, prioritizing community control and permanent affordability over individual profit, creating housing that remains accessible across generations regardless of market pressures.
These principles of community control and permanent affordability are also central to other community ownership and shared equity models with deep roots in racial justice movements. The community land trust model emerged from the Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s in Georgia to support African-American families to own and control land, achieve greater economic security, and fully exercise their legal voting rights without obstruction. A 2019 study found that shared equity housing models contributed to affordability and wealth creation, helped prevent foreclosure and displacement, and increasingly served families of color. Embedded in the growing movement toward social housing in many parts of the country are design principles to promote radical equity both in process and outcome.
Transformative housing approaches have limitations in advancing racial equity, however, despite their potential for structural change. While they challenge the commodification of housing that has historically harmed communities of color, these models often struggle to reach sufficient scale to affect racial disparities broadly. They generally grow slowly, while racial housing disparities continue to widen in the mainstream market, creating a mismatch between the pace of transformation and the urgency of racial justice needs. Still, while transformative approaches face scaling challenges, their success in creating lasting affordability and community control demonstrates viable alternatives to market-driven housing, and their growing adoption across diverse communities suggests increasing potential for systemic change as political and funding landscapes evolve.
Reparative Strategies
The Black Lives Matter movement, particularly following the murder of George Floyd, ignited a newfound search for reparative strategies that could withstand legal scrutiny. Evanston, Illinois, provided an instructive example. Following extensive documentation of the city’s role in housing discrimination, Evanston established a Restorative Housing Program that provides grants for home repairs or downpayment assistance to Black residents who can demonstrate they or their ancestors were victims of housing discrimination between 1919 and 1969. In 2022, its first year, the program received over 400 applications and awarded grants to 16 households. By 2024, the program was expected to award 80 grants.
Similarly, Portland, Oregon, created a first-of-its-kind preference policy that prioritized 40 percent of affordable rental and homeownership opportunities in the North and Northeast neighborhood to applicants “who were displaced, are at risk of displacement, or are the descendants of families displaced due to urban renewal in N/NE Portland.” In the first five years of implementation, researchers found that 84 percent of surveyed residents identified as Black, leading researchers to conclude the policy was a success at serving its intended population.
Although most reparative frameworks use a specific historical event as the underlying justification for a particular program, the enacted programs are often inadequate as a remedy. While they create direct pathways for repair, their narrow eligibility criteria and focus on documented historical harms can limit their reach, impose burdens on potential beneficiaries who have to provide historical documentation, and exclude many who continue to face housing discrimination today. The scale of many of these programs is insignificant compared to the scope of the harms they aim to address; however, early experiences from cities like Evanston, Santa Monica, and Berkeley demonstrate that local reparations processes can create meaningful pathways for making space, repairing economic harm, and rebuilding community for displaced residents.
Today’s Legal Constraints and the Importance of Engagement
Advocates of racially equitable housing justice face increasing legal challenges in developing policies that the courts will deem constitutional. The Supreme Court’s gutting of affirmative action in 2023 enables further restrictions on race-conscious or race-based remedies, and the federal government’s heightened attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion further narrows the legal windows of opportunity. In this context, it is important to reevaluate what outcomes different housing justice strategies can achieve.
Until recently, many policymakers had some confidence that they could use proxies (or criteria that are not race-based, but will tend to have a larger effect on people of certain races) to try to increase housing access for communities of color. However, under the current administration, public entities and institutions may be more vulnerable to scrutiny regardless of how they frame their efforts, as we can see with the administration’s scrutiny of college admissions. The current constraints may lead jurisdictions to focus on universal policies to increase access; however, unless these policies are accompanied by programs that effectively reach the intended beneficiaries, they may exacerbate inequality.
These three definitional frameworks provide a systematic approach to considering various pathways to housing justice, while taking into account their distinct implications and limitations. Regardless of which framework is used, robust community engagement and outreach are critical ingredients for decision-makers seeking to craft effective, equitable housing strategies that honor community values and priorities.
By understanding the unique strengths and limitations of each approach, housing advocates can develop more effective strategies to advance racial equity in an increasingly complex and challenging political landscape. The key is being intentional about which framework(s) drive specific initiatives, understanding the trade-offs involved, and communicating those trade-offs to decision-makers and community members alike. This clarity can help practitioners better articulate their strategies, engage communities more authentically, proactively address unintended but likely consequences, and ultimately make more progress toward housing justice.
About the Author
