A Connecticut Yankee in California, Week One: research on home ownership, and a few Asian culinary adventures

Thanks to an NEH grant, I just finished up 5 days of research at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library (and birthplace) in Yorba Linda, Orange County, California.  

I stayed in Long Beach, which a) enabled me to go to Los Angeles to eat and explore a bit after work; and b) enabled me to experience Greater L.A. traffic (yippee).  

I had an off-day on Sunday (I arrived the night before), so I started off by going to a great independent bookstore in downtown LA, The Last Bookstore.  Its in what appears to be an old bank building, and in many ways resembles a smaller version of The Strand in NYC.  My goal was to get a copy of Henry Miller's novel Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, since I'm heading up the coast starting Friday.  Or, failing that, Kerouac's Big Sur.  Neither was available, so I grabbed the new Leonard Cohen biography instead.

A man can only spend so much time reading about policy and land-use law, you know?

After the bookstore, I took the advice of friends and drove up to the Griffith Observatory, which provides an amazing view of the city and the Hollywood hills.

I finished the evening up by trying something new:  yakitori!  I've heard Bourdain rave about it for years, so why not?

And boy was he right.  One of the best meals I've ever had, honestly.  I believe the literal meaning of the word is 'grilled,' but that doesn't quite convey it.  The restaurant, Shin Sen Gumi Yakitori, was small and spartan.  I sat at the counter, and watched the chef grill a very wide variety of different meats on a little brazier right in front of me.

They don't do much with the meat -- just a very simple soy/teriyaki base, as far as I could tell.  But that's part of what was so wonderful about it:  just good quality meat (chicken, pork belly, chicken heart/liver, etc), cooked simply.  In some ways its like Brazilian rodizio, just a bit less gluttonous.

So, what would Nixon do (other than bomb)?
 
Why did I go to the Nixon Library?  

As many of you know, I'm writing a book, Castles Made of Sand?  Home Ownership in the Modern U.S.   The book has two objects (warning, dear reader -- scholar-speak forthcoming.  Viewer discretion advised):  

• to examine the history of home ownership since 1928, as an idea, a policy goal, and a reality politically and economically
• to explore whether home ownership has it presently exists in the United States is sustainable -- ecologically, economically, socially, and morally.  While home ownership is often thought of as the symbol of the 'American Dream,' it has also been (and still is) a great source of racial and economic inequality, particularly because of its close connection to educational opportunity.

Home ownership is a critical part of daily life for most Americans, and an aspiration for virtually all of them.  It is so ubiquitous, so embedded in our family histories, our economy and our landscape, that it is very difficult for us to see it as an historical artifact – as something created by (and in turn shaping) the choices of individuals and institutions.  Basically, I'm looking to peak behind the curtain, and explore whether there isn't another path.  

No post-war social phenomenon has been as critical for social mobility, economic growth, the use of metropolitan space, and political re-alignment as homeownership.  Nearly ¼ of the economy is tied up in residential investment, housing consumption and housing-related expenditures.  Most of the wealth possessed by American families (such as it is) is in the form of housing equity.  Because of how homeownership is geographically structured – often taking the form of suburban sprawl, in metropolitan areas that are segregated by both race and class – it is crucially linked to issues of ecological sustainability and inequality.   

One achieves full access to America’s limited range of social rights if one obtains two things: consistent full-time employment, and homeownership. The opportunity to obtain them is powerfully shaped by race and class, but also by where you live. Those with access to these things (and the places where they are found) are able to build wealth across generations, and to make residential choices that enhance educational opportunities for their children. Those without access find themselves both literally and figuratively left behind. 

And of course, particularly in recent decades, homeownership has increasingly lashed the American way of life (and family budgets) to global finance.  This has made us more insecure individually and collectively, it has made us more unequal than ever before, and it has made financial capital so politically powerful that none of us can miss the stench emanating from the Augean stables in Washington.  

So why Nixon? 

My hypothesis is that the 1966-1975 period was a critical stage in the development of our present social geography, and the political economy of home ownership, but that it also had embedded within it a ‘path not taken.’   It remains the only period in our history (other than 1865-1877, perhaps) when the nation actually attempted to understand and unwind the consequences of our racist history.  

Pushed by the civil rights movement, high level figures in both the Lyndon Johnson and Nixon administrations acknowledged the need for a greater federal role in expanding homeownership to low and moderate income citizens, and even contemplated using the lever of the federal purse to desegregate the expanding suburbs along racial and class lines.  These ideas received substantial support among scholars and activists, and by the early 1970s seemed to be making headway in the federal courts.   

As I've discovered in my research at the Johnson Library as well as in my work in Yorba Linda this week, there was a palpable sense of dramatic change in the air during Nixon's first term.  What did I look at this week, at the Nixon Library?  Mostly, I looked at the efforts of his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, George Romney (yes, that Romney) to use federal resources to expand home ownership for working-class people in a desegregated metropolitan America.  For more on this, see my article of last year in The American Prospect.  While this sense of impending change was welcomed by some, it was feared by the suburban white majority, to which both political parties increasingly appealed for votes.

For a variety of reasons this 'open door' slammed shut in the mid-70s, and it has never re-opened.  Essentially, for the first and only time in US history, the federal government appeared to have the resources, the leverage, and the legal, scholarly and political support to begin to unwind the patterns of racial and class segregation in housing (and, by extension, public education).  But it didn’t happen.  By 1975, both the courts and the federal government had fully retreated from all efforts to challenge metropolitan segregation, with dire consequences.  As home ownership was gradually expanded to include growing numbers of black, Hispanic and poor Americans in the last three decades (particularly in the 1990s and 2000s), it was largely facilitated by financial deregulation (which gave them all of the downsides of ownership, and none of the benefits), and built on top of metropolitan segregation. 

It is my sense that many of our present dilemmas are rooted in the opportunities lost during this period.  In other words, white privilege has brought the temple down upon itself.  The wages of whiteness, as DuBois once called them, remain of great consequence -- but the pursuit and protection of those wages has been bankrupting, economically and morally.  

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The Nixon Library itself is a nice place to work, though as my historian readers know, one archive looks pretty much like every other one.  It is plopped down on a very well-policed highway in Orange County, on a plot of land that could just as easily contain a strip mall as a Presidential Library.  

The grounds are quite beautiful:
 

Yorba Linda greeted me on Monday morning with a phalanx of state troopers aiming radar guns at me, like a battery of RPG launchers.  Seemed appropriate, though I am sadly too late to find myself on Nixon's enemies list. 

I have always found Nixon to be a sad figure; surrounded this week by photographs and paintings of the man, there is an almost palpable melancholy that seems to weigh on him.

 

At least that's what I saw.  And the whole thing was quite discomforting, because of my own reaction:  rather than feeling empathy, I experienced revulsion.  I realize this visceral reaction on my part is probably political and ideological -- but it caused me to spend as little down time as possible at the Library.  When I wasn't researching, I sat outside in the sun.

My closest encounter with Nixon was in the bathroom.  

I was standing at the urinal on Tuesday morning, when I absentmindedly glanced to my immediate right...and saw a Nixon impersonator staring right back at me.  I thankfully had the presence of mind to keep myself aimed in the right direction, though a liberal like myself doesn't get many opportunities to literally piss on Richard Nixon.  He winked at me (a bit skeezy, that), and headed out.  Apparently Tuesday August 13th was 'meet the president' day for children visiting the Museum.  One hopes their response to him was a bit more continent than mine.  

The Getty Museum, where Mark meets Clio (again):

On my last day in the Los Angeles area (today), I headed up to Malibu to visit the Getty Villa Museum.  I once visited this gorgeous place back in 1984, when I was 17, but aside from the reflecting pool and the breathtaking view, I have little memory of it.

Here's a brief video history of the Getty, if you're interested:




It has changed quite a bit in the intervening decade (as have I).  The Getty is now exclusively dedicated to statuary and artifacts from the ancient world, where once it contained a variety of European paintings and furniture.  But the beauty of the place remains, as you can see in this photograph of the Outer Peristyle:

 Getty himself was an oil baron, and one of the world's first billionaires.  He was notoriously cheap -- he once refused to pay ransom when his son was kidnapped -- and learned Arabic so as to more effectively bilk the people of Saudi Arabia out of their natural resource inheritance.  But Getty was also a scholar and admirer of the art of the ancient world, and sought to place his personal collection in a replica of the Villa dei Papiri (House of Papyrus scrolls, basically), which was destroyed by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D.  The idea was for those who saw his collection to get a sense of how such things might have been placed in an actual Roman villa two millenia ago.

I decided to go here today, seeking a sublime zen-like moment, preferably in the sun.  And I found it.

Aside from the placidity of the Peristyle, I think my favorite space was the one with the statutes of the Greek Muses -- which included Clio, the Muse of History:

 


































Shana arrives tonight, and we drive up the coast toward the Bay Area tomorrow, bringing the work portion of this trip to an end.

next up:  wine!!!!!!

George Romney Knew Better: Educational Inequality and the Continuing Significance of Racial Segregation

Nationally, black and Hispanic/Latino public school students are now more segregated from whites than at any point in the last four decades.  Most policymakers and activists on all sides accept the fact that our metropolitan areas are segregated by race as well as class, and work within its confines.  In this age of greatly diminished expectations – the ‘twilight of common dreams,’ as Todd Gitlin once put it – it is assumed either that these patterns aren’t terribly important, or that the practical and political obstacles to changing them are too overwhelming.  Today, Democrats and Republicans alike unashamedly promote efforts to “gild the ghetto” with charter schools that are more segregated than regular public schools, and with compensatory education programs that have little chance of truly compensating. But the black-white academic achievement gap is unlikely to narrow much further without revisiting the imperative of residential integration in our metropolitan areas.  By ignoring segregation, we thrust the entire burden of our unjust social geography on urban and high poverty schools, leaving white and privileged suburbs untouched.

However, as Richard Rothstein and I argue in "The Cost of Living Apart," in the September/October 2012 issue of The American Prospect, it wasn’t always this way.  From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s these geographical inequalities were very much a part of our public discourse.  As Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) during Richard Nixon’s first term, Republican George Romney – Mitt’s father -- led an ultimately unsuccessful crusade to use the power of the federal purse to ‘loosen the white noose’ and open up the suburbs along lines of race and class.  He believed that racial inequalities in education and opportunity could not be overcome any other way.  Forty years on, it seems clear that George was right.  Unfortunately, as the Democratic and Republican National Conventions near, it appears that neither party is willing to take up the banner of racial integration.

Racial segregation matters -- in Providence and elsewhere

As Rothstein and I discuss in the longer paper on which our American Prospect article is based, social scientific research on school segregation is quite clear.  Geographically concentrating poor black and Latino children – as we do in the Providence metropolitan area, and throughout the United States -- is harmful.  Integration, on the other hand, is beneficial.  Because black and Hispanic children in Providence and elsewhere are much more likely to be poor than white children are, racial segregation not only isolates them – it compounds the negative consequences of poverty, by concentrating it geographically. 

While we have much more research on the consequences of racial segregation for blacks than we do for Hispanics, both groups are clearly segregated here – in Providence, and in the metropolitan area as a whole.  This is one of the ten most segregated cities in the country for Hispanics.  In the Providence-Fall River metropolitan area, according to the U.S. Census, Hispanics have a ‘dissimilarity index’ of just over 70.7%; the index for the smaller black population is 65.5.  

What does this mean?  This means that 7 out of 10 Hispanics (and almost that many blacks) in greater Providence would have to move, in order to achieve an integrated pattern.  The dissimilarity index for Hispanics is slightly lower for Providence, 57.6%.  But all this tells us is that Rhode Island’s Hispanic population is heavily concentrated in the Capital City – and segregated within it.  The average Hispanic resident of Providence lives in a neighborhood made up 45.3% of other Hispanics, despite being just over 30% of the city’s population. 

While approximately half of the residents of Providence are white, the school age population is overwhelmingly Latino and black -- 84%, according to the latest RI KidsCount Factbook.  There are many reasons why this might be the case, some of them innocent and easily explained.  But the lack of affordable housing in the suburbs, due in large part to exclusionary zoning, is clearly a major factor trapping low and moderate income Hispanics and blacks in Providence.  Because of this, and because most public school children attend neighborhood schools, one consequence of the residential segregation of blacks and Latinos is school segregation.  26.4% of Hispanic public school students in Rhode Island, for example, attend extremely segregated schools (those with a 90-100% minority student body).

Combine this with Providence’s high rates of child poverty – among the worst in the nation for two decades now – and it should be abundantly clear that segregation matters.  Hispanic and black children in the Providence area (and nationally) are not only three times more likely to grow up in poverty than white children are; they are much more likely to live in predominantly poor neighborhoods and attend high poverty schools, even when they themselves aren't poor.  Nearly four in ten black and Latino children in Providence grow up in poverty.  As a consequence the average Hispanic primary school student in the Providence metropolitan area attends a school with a poverty rate of just under 75%.  The numbers are comparably stark for black students.  For whites, who are disproportionately found in suburban schools, its 32.1%.  Just 4% of students in Barrington's public schools live in poverty.

Politicians and experts typically refer to schools as “failing” if they are filled with poor children who don’t do well on high-stakes tests.  Faced with the obstacles posed by racial segregation and geographically concentrated poverty, however, such schools may be doing as well as they possibly can.  

Black and Latino children from poor Providence families disproportionately suffer from poor health, which causes frequent school absences.  A higher percentage of Providence school children changed schools during the 2010- 2011 school year than any other district in the state. During that time period, one in four (25%) Providence children changed schools, compared to the state rate of 14%.  Providence also has a very high rate of chronic early absence, the percentage of children in kindergarten through third grade who have missed at least 10% of the school year (i.e. 18 days or more). During the 2010-2011 school year, more than one in five (22%) Providence children in grades K-3 were chronically absent.  Children from poor families are much more likely to suffer from financial crises causing repeated household moves that result in changes of teachers and schools, with a resulting loss of instructional continuity.  

Poor children are also more likely to be living in communities with high levels of crime and disorder, and to have parents who are incarcerated (or whose employment prospects are greatly limited by prior imprisonment).  Recent scholarship also indicates that children growing up in poverty experience high levels of stress at young ages, which not only affects their health -- it shapes their cognitive development too.  Poor black and Latino students in Rhode Island on average attend low-performing high schools (according to test scores), where schools spend more time on discipline and 'teaching to the test' and less on instruction, while white students mostly attend high-performing high schools.  Poverty and inferior educational opportunities combine to drive blacks and Latinos out of high school at rates higher than that of white students, increasing the chances that their own children will grow up in poverty too.  

Children stuck in high poverty schools -- who are, again, disproportionately black and Hispanic -- are often isolated from the positive peer influences of middle-class children who were read to frequently when young, whose homes are filled with books, whose adult environment includes many college-educated professional role models, whose parents have greater educational experience and the motivation such experience brings and who have the time, confidence, and ability to monitor schools for academic standards.

Recent research confirms that integration not only benefits black students but also does no harm to white classmates, provided the concentration of disadvantaged children is not great enough to slow the instructional pace or deflect time from academics to discipline. When children whose parents have strong educational backgrounds comprise a strong classroom majority, all students benefit from the academic culture established by that majority. Integration is no panacea, but without it other reforms to raise the achievement of disadvantaged children have less promise.

 George Romney understood this.

Back to the future:  George Romney and the 'white noose'

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 – the Fair Housing Law – was passed in the waning days of the Johnson Administration.  Its language was ambiguous.  It could be interpreted narrowly, as a prohibition against racial discrimination.  Or, it could be seen as requiring HUD to ‘affirmatively promote’ racial and economic integration across the metropolitan landscape.  Recognizing the role that government at all levels had played – and continued to play – in the racial segregation of American cities and suburbs, George Romney chose the latter interpretation.  Federal policy, suburban zoning laws and discrimination by realtors and the financial sector had “built a high-income white noose basically around these inner cities, and the poor and disadvantaged, both black and white, are pretty much left in the inner city,” he told Congress.”  His 1968 campaign book, The Concerns of a Citizen, urged “we must have open housing on a statewide basis; eliminate zoning that creates either large-scale economic or racial segregation; provide low-cost private housing through nonprofit organizations in all parts of the metropolitan area and throughout the state.” 

During his first 18 months in office Romney quietly developed a series of programs and proposals that put HUD (and Nixon) on a collision course with metropolitan segregation – and those who preferred to leave it untouched.  The latter group included the increasingly suburban base of the Republican Party. 

Operation Breakthrough was designed to build low and moderate-income housing in the suburbs.  While it wasn’t aimed at racial integration, Romney intended to use HUD funding to either entice or coerce suburbs into revoking their exclusionary zoning laws.  Open Communities, however, was directly aimed at the racial integration of the suburbs.  Hidden even from the White House, by the summer of 1969 Romney and his staff had taken a full inventory of all federal programs that could be used to open the suburbs, and had even draw up a list of possible target areas.

They were deeply critical of the failures of their predecessors.  The Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, despite all of their rhetoric, “lacked the political fortitude to deal with urban problems on a metropolitan-wide basis,” wrote Under Secretary Richard Van Dusen in an internal policy memo in the fall of 1969.  Instead, “they poured large amounts of money into the ghettos.”  “The white suburban noose around the black in the city core is morally wrong, economically inefficient, socially destructive, and politically explosive,” one staffer wrote to Romney in August 1969.  What was needed was a “frontal assault on suburbia.”  Using the carrot – the promise of federal funds – HUD began to put both programs into practice during the first six months of 1970.  Romney went to Congress in May 1970 to get legislative authority to use coercion (‘the stick’) as well.

George Romney was no lone crusader.  Indeed, it is a sign of how far even liberals have strayed in the 21^st century from the dreams of the civil rights movement, that questioning metropolitan segregation was quite common among Republicans as well as Democrats in the 60s and early 70s.  President Johnson was somewhat vexed by the fact that each urban, suburban and educational task force he appointed in his second term seemed to call for metropolitan desegregation, even as he was casting about for alternative and more politically viable approaches to the urban crisis.  This included the famous Kerner Commission, which in 1968 called for the integration of “substantial numbers of Negroes into the society outside the ghetto,” through the reorientation of federal programs and the placement of low and moderate-income housing in the suburbs.  Failure to do so would condemn blacks to a “permanently inferior economic status,” rendering the U.S. “two nations, separate and unequal.”

Angered at Romney’s secrecy, and under increasingly intense pressure from suburban officials, Nixon made his position explicit in a series of statements between December 1970 and June 1971, declaring his belief that the federal government did not have the legal authority to ‘force’ racial and economic integration of the suburbs.  While he would enforce non-discrimination law, he insisted that racial segregation in the suburbs was a byproduct of economic considerations, not discrimination.  Privately, he even considered introducing a constitutional amendment banning federal efforts to force educational and residential integration.  Romney was pushed out after the November 1972 election.  “Nixon’s policy,” according to Charles Lamb, who served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in the mid-70s, “was consciously designed to protect the status quo, to shield suburbs from economic, and thus racial, integration.  Its political intent was to preserve the Republican political base for years to come.”

Federal urban policy since then has focused primarily (and weakly) on improving the quality of ghetto neighborhoods (and their residents) by devolving resources and power to municipal authorities, public-private partnerships and Community Development Corporations (CDCs), not on the forces that create and sustain metropolitan inequality.  Particularly since 1980, federal and local governments have embraced an ideology of market accommodation in policy making that emphasizes privatization, decentralization, economic competitiveness, and creating a favorable ‘business climate.’  National policymakers in both parties have continued to deploy the rhetoric of decentralization and localism – for education, as well as urban policy more generally.  This approach enjoys support from free-market advocates on the right as well as community-based activists on the left.  Politically, it has granted both political parties a kind of cheap policy grace, presenting the appearance of doing something about poverty and urban problems, but without the political and economic costs that confronting metropolitan segregation, economic insecurity and an underfunded and inadequate welfare state would actually entail.  The social consequences of this persistent localism have been profound, setting in motion a kind of “feedback loop” that reinforces patterns of place-based racial and economic inequality.

Despite the growing ideological divisions of our age, there has been a surprising political convergence on issues related to urban policy, social services, and housing.  From the spread of charter schools, to the expansion of home ownership through financial deregulation, it is apparent that left and right agree on much more than is commonly assumed.  Virtually all of these points of agreement either hide or exacerbate racial and economic segregation, or geographically concentrate its deleterious consequences.  In many ways the Obama Administration’s embrace of urban charter schools, school choice, and the use of market models for the assessment of students, teachers and schools, is emblematic of this convergence.  Despite a lack of evidence of their efficacy, and growing empirical support for the integration of schools by class as well as race, the ‘achievement gap’ is virtually never discussed in terms of the intersection between inequality and social geography.

George Romney understood that there is little chance we can substantially narrow the achievement gap without breaking up heavy concentrations of low-income minority children in urban schools, giving these children opportunities to attend majority middle-class schools outside their “truly disadvantaged” neighborhoods. But urban children cannot have a practical opportunity to attend such middle-class schools unless their parents have the opportunity to live nearby.