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