Program to Spur Low-Income Housing Is Keeping Cities Segregated
“No,” Erica Ashton, 38, said of whether she would move to the Galleria from her spartan,
low-income apartment complex in a predominantly black part of northwest Houston.
By JOHN ELIGON, YAMICHE ALCINDOR and AGUSTIN ARMENDARIZJULY 2, 2017
HOUSTON — A mural on the wall of an elementary school here proclaimed, “All the world is all of us,”
but the hundreds of people packing the auditorium one night were determined to stop a low-income housing project from coming to their upscale neighborhood.
While nearly 58 percent of the people living in all tax-credit properties in Houston
are black, the area proposed for the housing development is just 3 percent black.
“I don’t think the right message to be sending to kids in low-income families is
that the only way they can succeed is that they have to move into affluent communities to do that,” he said.
A review of federal data by found that in the United States’ biggest metropolitan areas, low-income housing projects
that use federal tax credits — the nation’s biggest source of funding for affordable housing — are disproportionately built in majority nonwhite communities.
The proposed 233-unit building, which was to be funded with federal tax credits, would burden their already
overcrowded elementary school with new children, many people argued during a lively meeting last year.
“It’s been clear for a long time that the tax-credit program is perpetuating racial segregation,” said Michael Daniel, a fair-housing lawyer.