The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (z-lib.org).epub

The housing subsidy that the federal government gives to middle-class
(mostly white) homeowners is an entitlement: any homeowner with enough
income to file a detailed tax return can claim a deduction both for property
taxes and mortgage insurance. The government does not tell homeowners
that only the first few who file can claim the deductions and the rest are out
of luck because the money has been used up. But that is how we handle the
Section 8 subsidy for lower-income (mostly African American) renters.
So long as a shortage of vouchers persists, Congress should require that
local housing authorities establish a preference for tenants who volunteer to
use their Section 8 benefits to find apartments in integrated, low-poverty
neighborhoods. To make this possible, other reforms are necessary.
Voucher amounts are normally set to permit leasing of apartments whose
rents are close to the median for a metropolitan area. But rental amounts that
are typical for a metropolitan area overall are too low for leasing in most
low-poverty neighborhoods. So voucher amounts will have to be increased if
programs like Baltimore’s are to expand nationwide, and more dollars—for
security deposits, for example—made available as well. Large numbers of
counselors and social workers will have to be hired and trained. Funds will
also have to be authorized to enable authorities to purchase single-family
homes for some former public housing residents. In Baltimore the court
order compelled HUD to come up with such funds. Expanding this program
will require congressional action.
In its waning days, the Obama administration announced that HUD
would begin calculating Section 8 voucher amounts for smaller areas than a
full metropolis. Section 8 recipients would receive larger subsidies to rent
apartments in higher-cost, middle-class neighborhoods and smaller subsidies
to use in low-income neighborhoods where rents are lower. As this is
written, it is too soon to know whether the new administration will maintain
or reverse this new policy.
Other, more technical reforms of the Section 8 program could also help.
For example, the vouchers are usually administered by a city housing
authority that has no right to permit the vouchers to be used outside city
limits. Vouchers can’t contribute much to integration unless such
jurisdictional rules are eliminated and the program is organized on a
metropolitan basis.