Forced integration of populations in housing, because it worked so well with school bussing. (sarcasm)
Is desegregation dead? - San Francisco gives parents a say in where their children go to school — and that is leading to less diversity
San Francisco gives parents a say in where their children go to school — and that is leading to less diversity
[snip]
A federal judge ordered desegregation, and in 1971 San Francisco put children on buses that crisscrossed the city so they could be in multiracial schools.
The plan almost immediately ended racial isolation — but it also helped drive families out of the district and into the suburbs or into private schools. Many Chinese families resisted integration, boycotting district public schools and creating their own private “freedom schools” for their children instead.
From the 1960s to 1983, the school district enrollment plunged by 32,000 students.
Vying factions of parents filed lawsuits, and the district tried several different school assignment methods. A federal judge oversaw those efforts from 1983 to 2005, but eventually gave up and called the district’s attempts at diversification a failure. This handed control of the assignment system back to the school district...
[snip]
“If the school reflects the community, it’s not necessarily a problem,” he said. “It’s absolutely about every student being successful at every school.”
Sanchez and Van Court are not alone. Even the African American community, the force behind the historical desegregation efforts, has fallen silent.
“We really don’t have any public demand for this,” State Board of Education President Mike Kirst said about desegregation. “The courts, of course, have largely retreated in this area. And I feel no bottom-up demand for this.”
But just because everybody’s OK with the status quo doesn’t mean it’s right, said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA....."
How a Seattle Plan to End Single-Family Zoning Could Change Affordable Housing
Some of the proposed tools are untested, some are best practices. Together, they would set the city on the progressive edge.
Kriston Capps
Jul 13, 2015
The 28-member committee—planners, business owners, architects, advocates, and other people in housing, right down to the tenants—even fingers how race and class discrimination have guided the history of single-family zoning. This is the purpose of single-family housing: to keep poor people and people of color out of white, wealthy neighborhoods by erecting high barriers to entry. The Seattle committee recommends that the city take those barriers down by replacing “single-family zones” with “low-density residential zones” and upzoning practically everywhere else.
That is a solution that is so clear and sensible that it’s dangerous.
The formal proposal released by Mayor Murray today is lighter on theory and details, but it gives a broader account of the mayor’s plans for affordable housing. Seattle can build or preserve 50,000 new units of housing over the next decade, with almost half (20,000 units) designated affordable.
That’s a reasonable goal. But it’s clear from the mayor’s proposal that he isn’t merely looking to expand affordable housing. Mayor Murray and his City Council allies want to build fairly. Seattle could get housing that is fundamentally just, and that’s something we haven’t seen in any city anywhere.
Use property taxes to promote affordable housing
Mayor Murray proposes to double Seattle’s housing levy—to $290 million—in order to build affordable housing. He also proposes a 0.25 percent tax on real-estate transfers in the hopes of capturing some of the value from rising land prices and redirecting it toward affordable housing. The mayor also calls for an expansion of the multifamily property tax exemption.
Reform parking and preservation requirements
Historic review and design review are important tools for protecting the culture and texture of a city, but yeesh, these tools can be a NIMBY’s deadliest weapon. Seattle’s already done the hard work of eliminating parking minimums from its urban centers and urban villages, so the mayor’s goal is to remove parking requirements beyond these areas.
Three mantras for building: taller, denser, more inclusive
Mayor Murray cannot eliminate single-family housing in one fell swoop. He would be chased out of town with pitchforks and torches.
But enabling low-density housing throughout most of Seattle (rowhouses, duplexes, triplexes, courtyard housing, and so on) is a start. The proposal also calls for taller height limits and relaxed building and fire codes to encourage denser wood-frame multifamily construction. Mandatory inclusionary housing plus upzoning to make room for these requirements is part of the mayor’s package.
SNIP
People hated forced busing, but home schooling and private schooling and finagling public school admissions provided some immediate relief.
Plopping a small inner city housing project in the middle of a middle class neighborhood has no immediate relief but moving, and given the 50K drop in property values for the neighbors, that becomes much harder.
And since the White House wants this national, there then really isn’t “relief”, only less affected areas.