Opening' the Suburbs: Does Hartford Point the Way?

McAULIFFE, KEVIN

'Opening' the Suburbs: Does Hartford Point the Way? KEVIN McAULIFFE Hartford, Connecticut The Supreme Court had barely announced its decision earlier this year "opening" the suburbs to low-income...

...And in Hartford, director Lawrence Thompson, after receiving the Meeker memorandum, gave grants to six towns — West Hartford, Windsor Locks, Enfield, Vernon, Glastonbury, Farmington — that submitted "zero expected to reside" figures, while approving East Hartford's application, backed up with the waiting list at its housing authority as its only data...
...Hartford to gloat...
...I am optimistic that regional relations are going to be much better," he predicted, and they became better almost immediately...
...When the deadline came to appeal Blumenfeld's ruling, HUD did not file one, and six of the seven towns dutifully reapplied under the terms of the 1974 Act and the permanent injunction...
...On hearing the decision, Suisman compared it to Brown v. Board of Education, then cautioned that "this is certainly not a day for...
...Laurel — that developing communities must provide their "fair share" of new public housing — does not by itself undo the damage already done to the cities by an entire generation of suburbanization...
...One out of nine people in Hartford is out of work...
...The seventh, Windsor Locks, hometown of Governor Grasso, decided to do without its grant...
...And elsewhere, city by city, case by case, those seeking to breach the defenses of white suburbia will have to keep suing...
...To achieve such "spatial deconcentration," the Act requires that all municipalities, suburban as well as urban, must submit a so-called Housing Assistance Plan that sets future goals for low-income housing and provides a hard figure for how many low-income people are "expected to reside" there...
...Its minority population is pushing 40 per cent, but in the schools it is twice that much, a fourfold increase in the last two decades...
...For all its efforts to remain viable, Hartford, when the Brookings Institution devised a "city-suburb hardship index," placed third on the list, behind only Newark and Cleveland, seven places ahead of bankrupt New York...
...He ruled that "HUD acted contrary to law when it approved these six grants" from towns which predicted "zero expected to reside" and that in the case of East Hartford's flimsy, inadequate figures HUD Secretary Hills "abused her discretion" in approving them without any attempt at verification based on contradictory, easily available data...
...thereby effectively gutting the 'enforcement' provisions...
...The statute could not be more clear," he declared...
...Zitser reminded the court that there was a "substantial exodus of manufacturing and commercial concerns to suburban areas and a general trend of new industry establishing itself outside the inner city...
...The reaction was outrage...
...Blumenfeld made his injunction permanent...
...The idea first occurred to liberal Democratic City Councilman Richard Suisman, who successfully proposed in February 1975 that $10,000 be diverted from the grant "to review, analyze, and monitor" the suburbs' applications for compliance to the spirit and letter of the 1974 Act...
...But the biggest political power in the city is Councilman Nicholas Carbone, a young, tough Italian-American leader who had taken control of the local party during Governor Ella Grasso's campaign for the nomination in 1974...
...After chairing three months of hearings on the matter by his economic research and development committee, Suisman praised the efforts of several towns, selected the seven as targets, and co-sponsored a resolution for a suit that a unanimous Council approved on June 23...
...In an emphatically worded, categorical decision released on February 28, Judge Blumenfeld made it clear he found no merit in that argument...
...but the jobs which exist are out in the suburbs...
...The city needs to replace or rebuild 16,000 units in its housing stock, but it has the money and the land for less than half that many...
...The Connecticut River, which slices across its eastern boundary, was brought back to rnarine life in the 1960s...
...Even the victorious plaintiffs' attorney, Alexander Poli-koff, cautioned that "it's going to take forty years to implement this decision...
...The idea to enjoin HUD's grants to the suburbs was not to force the diversion of the funds to the city, but to place the towns in a position where they would either have to forfeit their share of the money or let down their defenses against low-income housing — and people...
...One out of six families lives below the poverty line...
...And, he added, with the "additional social and educational services to meet the special needs of said economically disadvantaged citizens," the city's tax base had been "greatly diminished and jeopardized...
...Not every deteriorating big city is in Hartford's situation, but many are, and Hartford v. Hills joined the urban-suburban issue of income apartheid more effectively than any action by any city before...
...Only 24 per cent of Greater Hartford's population live within the city, but it has 61 per cent of all its subsidized housing, 71 per cent of its low-income housing, 90 per cent of its blacks and Puerto Ricans...
...The night Judge Blumenfeld announced his decision, twenty-eight other towns in the Capital Region voted to impose a five-year building program for low and middle-income housing on themselves...
...And, in one brief of legalese, counsel Barry Zitser spelled out before Judge Blumenfeld the essence of the urban malaise...
...But the assistant counsel took the case, the city put up the bond, and even to Suis-man's surprise, the progressive judge issued a temporary injunction against the towns on September 30, 1975, from "spending in any fashion" the disputed grants...
...The Secretary was not empowered to waive the requirement" and "the Meeker memorandum permits suburban towns to obtain funding under the Act without the quid pro quo Congress decided to require...
...But ghettos Hartford does have, plus the tremendous, unequal tax burden that goes with them, while a ring of placid country-town suburbs surrounds it, luring its tax base away, keeping its problems out...
...Thus, it "did not violate the law, but supplemented it...
...has placed a severe strain on the municipality and the services it is able to handle," and the suburbs "set forth misleading and insufficient housing goals," full of "deficiencies, misstatements, and omissions...
...The victory it won for the "carrot-and-stick" approach indicates that there is a way to compel the suburbs to live up to their obligations before the cities die...
...Congress passed the Community Development Act of 1974, phasing out seven separate programs in favor of block grants to municipalities, precisely to end such "isolation of income groups within communities and geographical areas" and promote "diversity and vitality of neighborhoods through the spatial deconcentration of housing opportunities for persons of lower income...
...If urbanologists of the future ever get to write the history Kevin McA uliffe is a free-lance writer living in New York...
...Where the figures are "plainly inconsistent" with the facts as the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) knows them, the Secretary is required to disapprove the application...
...KEVIN McAULIFFE Hartford, Connecticut The Supreme Court had barely announced its decision earlier this year "opening" the suburbs to low-income housing for minorities before the ruling's "enforceability gap" became apparent...
...All this has "significantly contributed to the exodus of economically viable non-minority persons and families into the contiguous towns...
...Four days earlier, HUD, perhaps anticipating Blumen-feld's decision, quietly published in the Federal Register new rules specifying that all cities and towns seeking grants set realistic goals not just for low-income housing, but for housing families of workers employed, but not yet able to live, within the town line...
...Hartford received $10.3 million, and planned to sue...
...The city's ceremonial mayor, George Athanson, let it be known he had "always opposed" the suit, and one council member switched positions, urging negotiations before city-suburb relations might be permanently ruptured...
...Before Hartford v. Hills (HUD Secretary Carla A. Hills was the prime respondent, cited under the 1974 Act, the Civil Rights Acts of 1968 and 1964, and the Fifth Amendment) was formally joined on August 14, the city's corporation counsel backed out of the unprecedented case and Federal District Judge M. Joseph Blumenfeld required a bond by the city to compensate the seven towns for delays in case it lost the suit...
...But on May 21, 1975, supposedly in response to complaints that towns all over the country were having trouble coming up with their "expected to reside" figure, David O. Meeker Jr., HUD's assistant secretary for community planning and development, sent a memo to regional offices giving their directors options in enforcing the requirement...
...The mayor of one adjoining town suggested expelling Hartford from the Capital Region planning council...
...The pattern in Chicago — a Housing Authority which has statutory power to build outside the city limits but which refused to do so — is not repeated elsewhere...
...He is now writing a history of The Village Voice which will be published by Charles Scribner's Sons...
...The city, he explained, was confronted with "the enormous task of attempting to provide adequate shelter for the substantial proportion of families of low income who reside within its borders" while "erosion of its tax base...
...Job opportunities for low and middle-income workers were cut off, thus "maintaining and perpetuating segregation of the poor and minorities within the inner city of Hartford...
...The new Civic Center that opened last year was only the latest in a series of new buildings bringing vitality back to its rebuilt downtown...
...He proposed that the city spend some of its community development funding on an informational campaign to improve regional cooperation, and this was voted...
...sewers, access roads, elderly centers, a business-area redevelopment project, and a data collection system...
...Close to Suisman personally and politically, Carbone held a press conference on October 16 and gave the word that the city, with nothing to lose, would take its chances with the suit: "The city has continually come out with a minus anyway...
...of Twentieth Century America's recovery from urban decay, Hartford, not Chicago, might be their turning point...
...By itself, it gives the core cities of the nation's Northeastern industrial belt — all going the way of New York-style disintegration at one speed or another — no means to arrest their slide into the circular syndrome of white flight, high crime, high welfare, terrible and dangerous schools, no tax base, and more white flight...
...to the city's fiscal detriment...
...Even its black and Puerto Rican ghettos, not far from the center of the city, lack the mean look not just of the South Bronx, but of the white working-class communities of the nearby Nauga-tuck Valley...
...The City Council has had "to limit and constrict expenditures for all municipal services to a point whereby their level and quality are inferior" to those of the outside towns...
...So the city proceeded, aided by a legal research-civil rights group call the Suburban Action Institute and armed with the Brookings report which, in the words of one senior fellow, "suggests that there is a pool of working-age persons now living in the city...
...The towns, averaging minority populations of 1 per cent, received a total of $4,435,000 and planned such projects as new town greens...
...But the case of Hartford, Connecticut, is typical, and it was there that, almost entirely unnoticed, a victory was won for a new "carrot-and-stick" approach to opening up the suburbs — an approach that might bring the immediate and visible results the cities need if they are not to die...
...The city, holding steady at 160,000 people, revolving around the state's government and the nation's insurance industry, and wedged into the rolling green hills of the Connecticut River Valley that so starkly contrasts its sleek, functional skyline, shows signs of regeneration...
...Many neighborhoods within the city limits, with their low-rise brownstones and row houses, are still livable, or are being rehabilitated...
...Similarly, the New Jersey Supreme Court's tough order recently given to the town of Mt...
...The first selectman of Windsor Locks even advocated a boycott of the stores in downtown Hartford as retaliation...
...In response, Government lawyers, speaking for HUD and the towns, could only claim that Hartford painted "a distorted picture of its need for the funds" — which it was not asking for — and that the Meeker memo sought to defer, not waive, the requirements of the 1974 Act...

Vol. 40 • November 1976 • No. 11


 
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