Using Fair Housing Planning as a Tool to Address Schooling Inequities

• In Event: Critical Intersections Among Housing and Education: Understanding Relationships, and Exploring New Opportunities, Across Policy Spheres

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory analysis assessing the extent to which education was coordinated with housing policies in the Assessments of Fair Housing (AFH) approved by Housing and Urban Development as part of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule. Due to pervasive inequality of access to high-quality schools across metropolitan areas, and increasing fragmentation by race and income (Owens, Reardon & Jencks, 2016; Hasan & Kumar, 2018), there is a strong need for the coordination of education and housing policies at the local and regional level (Holme & Finnigan, 2018; Haberle & Tegeler, 2019). Given the lack of analysis regarding when and how education and housing policy actors coordinate, and the types of policy spaces that connect them, the HUD AFFH plans present a valuable opportunity to examine the target and intensity of these efforts. They provide an important contemporary window into government efforts to engage with the spatial foundations of inequality (Galster & Sharkey, 2017), which are chronic issues meriting policy attention and problem-solving in both housing and education policy (Dawkins, 2017).

Prior studies such as the work of Steil and Kelly (2019) analyze the overall components of the AFFH plans, but to date, the housing and education policy nexus has not been explored within the context of these plans. Consequently, we look explicitly at whether and how educational policies and institutions were included in these plans, and how coordination at the housing-education nexus reflects policy-driven problem-solving to address the spatial foundations of inequality.

We examine how each plan’s stated goals relate to addressing housing and education issues. When goals are included, we were interested in whether they target improving access to schools, quality of schools, school integration and/or poverty de-concentration, and/or institutional agencies linking the areas of housing and education. We further asked: With whom did the agency coordinate (e.g., local school district)? What was the local government planning to do? What proposed measures would be used to evaluate progress? Were any other community or government partners mentioned? Was there recommended funding to support the plans?
To complement our analysis of coordination between housing and schools in AFH plans, we included interviews with a subset of participating jurisdictions to explore to what degree the plans were being implemented; what institutional agencies were involved; what barriers have limited enactment; and whether there has been measurable progress in any areas aligned with goals. Based on collective analysis of the data, we present a typology of education-housing coordination activities and policy instruments across the country. Our initial results suggest that even in the limited number of cases where educational entities were included in the fair housing planning process, the housing-education nexus remains largely absent from the proposed policy interventions to further regional fairness. This suggests a need not only for more robust planning processes, but also more holistic theoretical frameworks for engaging with the housing-education nexus. This study provides a significant knowledge baseline for future studies of regional studies of housing and education policy coordination at state and local levels.

Authors

• Andrew J. Greenlee, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Kara S. Finnigan, University of Rochester

• Elizabeth H. DeBray, University of Georgia

• Megan Haberle, Poverty and Race Research Action Council

• Heidi Kurniawan, Poverty and Race Research Action Council

• Jade Harvey, Poverty and Race Research Action Council