The ghost of Gautreaux - Clinton administration plan to mandate housing policy

National Review, March 7, 1994 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

The halfway house to residential central planning is "integration maintenance" (IM). It uses preferential treatment to bring about and preserve integration. For example, whites will be favored if they choose to move into a black area, while blacks wanting to move to the same area will not. Starrett City in Brooklyn adopted this policy until blacks sued over loan preferences for whites.

IM policies already tried include forbidding whites to sell early in the integration process, before property values fall. Other policies being proposed include requiring advance notification of the intent to sell, banning real-estate solicitations, and even outlawing "For Sale" and "Sold" signs.

In a typical case of policy backfire, IM policies actually increase the likelihood of whites leaving. If whites believe that blacks moving in are doing so because of economic advancement, acquiring mortgages and homes through their own achievement, the whites are more likely to stay. But if members of the underclass, with attitudes and behaviors unchanged, are enabled to live in a suburb through social engineering, then whites will flee.

Rethinking Priorities

THE academic journals never raise the question, but why should perfect integration be a policy ideal? Free-market economists have emphasized that the market brings people together, forming communities of commerce among differing groups. But it is equally true that markets mean choice, and with choice comes sorting. People tend to choose to work, socialize, and live with others in their own social, religious, cultural, and economic group. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it creates real diversity among neighborhoods.

The tendency of people to sort themselves is well known to demographers, and the literature is filled with fretting over this natural system. Sociologist Clyde O. McDaniel, for example, defines segregation as "de jure and de facto separation of people's living quarters by some demographic feature like race." But shouldn't the term segregation be limited to state-enforced policy, and not used to describe the results of human choice?

Wherever there was once de jure segregation--and its importance in housing has been hysterically exaggerated-it is long gone. Since a Supreme Court decision in 1917, people have legally been able to live where they wanted to, and that choice has been largely determined by economic considerations.

A good example is Houston, which has had no zoning for more than a hundred years, and no state-enforced housing segregation. Yet most blacks live, as they have always done, in a few neighborhoods that are on average 90 per cent black. Even after many attempts to reduce residential separation (by the Justice Department, HUD, the city council, and the courts) the Dissimilarity Index for Houston is still 81 per cent. It will probably always be so, absent a totalitarian version of integration maintenance.

Government cannot know the proper level of racial togetherness any more than it can know how to organize industry. Both must be determined by the market, the only rational means of social and economic cooperation. The free choices of free people may result in groupings the central government doesn't like, but a society that values liberty will hold fast to the principle of voluntary association.