COMMENTS: "Tipping" in Housing: A Hard Case

...None of these fears were spurious, least of all those of Starrett whites bludgeoned out of their old neighborhoods by black crime and the many effects of disinvestment accompanying blacks' arrival...

...In defense of integration, Starrett's weapon of last resort was preferential treatment of whites...

...There simply is no reason to believe that Starrett City, with its tradition of tenant vigilance, a capable management, and distance from the ghetto turf, would meet the fate of Linden Plaza...

...Does it...

...The point was to include a reasonable number of them in the felicities of gentlemanly life...

...And those who believed—on "evidence" no more or less substantial than Morley's about middleclass blacks—that Jews tended to be pushy certainly feared for the code of gentlemanly honor...

...Even though Linden Plaza, after tipping, had a higher average household income than Starrett City, it was engulfed in crime, vandalism, and management neglect, while Starrett remained relatively safe and clean...

...The abrasions of cultural change, the fear of being rendered a minority on what had been one's own turf, would precipitate white flight even without crime...

...Starrett's management insists that it must keep its minority population at roughly 40 percent in order to forestall white flight from the "inevitable" deterioration a black influx is supposed to bring...

...Integration isn't just an admirable idea but, as Jefferson Morley put it in defending Starrett's quotas in the New Republic (July 9, 1984), "a practical necessity" to protect current black residents as well as whites—even if that means relying on stigmatizing quotas that buck Starrett City's waiting list, which has many more qualified blacks than whites seeking its pleasant apartments...

...White families obtained apartments in two months while blacks languished for 20 and more...

...Surely, no stigma would result for whites under such circumstances...

...Rather, it was undeniable that the social disorganization afflicting large black populations—unsupervised youth, discouraged workers, and above all, a higher crime rate—simply became intolerable at some point to their white neighbors...

...Heavens, no...

...one can't help imagining that, in the fantasies of Yale admissions officers, too many Jews would simply have engulfed and destroyed Yale's traditional way of life...

...There is a different scenario that also is based on New York's experience...

...Yet now qualified minority applicants who'd had nothing to do with that crime— and often suffered it themselves—were enduring discriminatory treatment from Starittt management...

...no whites on the waiting list would be denied on the basis of color...

...That last point puts me in mind of the old "Jewish quota" of 12 percent at Yale University during the 1930s...

...Whites on Starrett's waiting list would lose only preferential treatment, not equal treatment...

...Those who would leave would be forced to take a bite out of scarcity, and few, I think, would argue that they should suffer for blacks to advance...

...blacks would be gaining equal, not preferential, treatment...

...If, as these examples make clear, site-specific integration isn't always a precondition for black stability, then the demise of integration at Starrett would have to be weighed against the gain for working- and middle-class blacks of thousands of decent apartments in a housing market that has limited their dwelling options more severely than those of the admittedly hard-pressed whites...

...MORLEY ALSO CLAIMS that middle-class black neighborhoods show higher crime rates than their white counterparts, taking his evidence from Linden Plaza (which is not "down the street" from Starrett in any ordinary sense, but rather on the other side of the no-man's-land of shopping centers, major highways, and open marshland that isolates Starrett City from the ghetto territory of BrownsvilleEast New York, where Linden Plaza is situated...

...For Morley, This is a distinction without a difference: Traditional affirmative action is also "exclusionary," at least for those whites [Brian Weber, Allen Bakke] who would not be hired or admitted to law school because of it...

...Then a recent court settlement upholding "occupancy controls" in Brooklyn's Starrett City, the country's largest federally subsidized housing development, might make more sense...

...That was jolting, but fair...

...They worked with such local politicians as Assemblywoman Rhoda Jacobs, who found that while management supplied Vanderveer with two security guards, it had six at its Dunbar Apartments in Manhattan, a development one-fifth Vanderveer's size...

...They had saved, they had waited...

...most of Starrett City's whites do not, certainly not in the New York City rental market...

...New York State did agree, as part of the Starrett settlement, to open up 86 of its overwhelmingly white developments in New York City, but at a pace so slow (20 percent minority occupancy by 1999) that few of Starrett's aggrieved black applicants can expect relief...

...Starrett could screen them by nonracial criteria that courts have upheld and that black residents have been the first to demand and to use successfully in many developments where they predominate...

...A monument to fear" was how some critics described Starrett, with its original quota of 30 percent for minorities: local politicians feared losing white votes they needed to stay in office, and the Starrett Corporation (then flirting with bankruptcy) feared a threat to profitability...

...But consider what color-blind admissions would mean...

...HOUSING OPPORTUNITY, NOT INTEGRATION, was certainly the primary goal of five black plaintiffs who brought the class-action suit on behalf of the 9,000 minority applicants on Starrett's list...

...True, Yale's WASPs had resources to go elsewhere...

...Rather, they were being asked to cope with scarcities that blacks had hitherto borne disproportionately...

...Bright Jewish boys of the time were bound to run afoul of those gentlemanly felicities...

...Nor is it clear if, and from what, whites would be "fleeing" were Starrett to accept, on a racially first-come, first-served basis, the many "model" applicants it could cull from the 9,000 minority families on its waiting list of 14,000...

...This splendidly isolated "new town" was also a response to racial change in the neighborhoods many of its residents' had left behind...

...Starrett had an answer: it would make sure too many whites didn't leave by making sure too many blacks didn't get in...

...Management attitudes are critical...

...Not only did management diminish security and repairs...

...That two such groups must fight over scarce housing is an indictment of society's leaders and investment priorities...

...But if it wanted a stable middle-income project, it had to attract—and keep —a larger number of whites...

...At the judge's invitation, plain-spoken tales of pain and puzzlement poured forth...

...A larger development that Morley might have cited, the 2,500-unit Vanderveer Estates in Brooklyn's Flatbush section, had similar problems after it "tipped" and became virtually all-black in the mid-'70s...

...Its purpose, of course, was not to remedy a dearth of Jewish representation' but to restrain what, on scholastic merit alone, might otherwise have been a surfeit...

...Simply put, their argument is that a color-blind admissions policy, no matter how strict on other counts, would necessarily create not just a new "segregation" through white flight but also a new "ghettoization," which would nullify black gains of additional housing units...

...There are compelling arguments for integration and perhaps even for the Starrett settlement, but blacks' putative need to live in integrated developments in order to be protected from themselves simply isn't among them...

...Yet Starrett management's defenders won the day by insisting on the negative consequences of "tipping...

...Starrett was built in 1973 at the outskirts of Brooklyn as part of New York City's answer to the suburban exodus—an effort to hold the middleincome tax base...

...Yes, whites might move out as more blacks arrive, but they might well be leaving a Starrett City as exemplary as the middle- and solid working-class black communities of Esplanade Gardens, Lenox Terrace, Riverton, River Bend, Atlantic Plaza Towers, and others whose success is apparently unknown to most commentators...

...A color-blind rather 19 than preferential admissions policy at Starrett would be fairer still...

...New York housing activist Bill Price writes: The real nature of the "tipping point" is that it institutionalizes white fears and defines a percentage level to white tolerance...

...I don't mean to stretch this analogy unbearably...

...As in many forms of racism, this process identifies the oppressed as the oppressor and thereby creates a rationalization through which whites can maintain power without feeling guilty about it...

...and it may not have been necessarily wrong for "old Blues" to fear the changes a rapid influx of Jews (and ethnic Catholics) would have brought...

...Emphasis added.] "Racial tipping," in short, inevitably brings instability and decay...

...It finds scant refuge in principles of affirmative action, if we define it not as integration at a particular location but as the broader access to decent housing and jobs, which is a precondition for real integration in the long run...

...Preserving integration, desirable though it might be, could not be the primary goal, if achieving it meant limiting the housing options of disadvantaged yet deserving blacks, while catering to the fears of whites whose options are marginally greater...

...Starrett was sure to attract black tenants...

...The causes of "tipping" are not black...

...White fears might originate in racism...

...but they were also fed by the reality of muggings...

...This is why there is something mystifying about Morley's argument that blacks excluded from Starrett are no more unfairly treated than Allen Bakke or Brian Weber...

...Yale is a private (even if also "national") institution, unlike publicly subsidized housing...

...nevertheless, within four years it became 95 percent black...

...It pledged to stay integrated...

...And occupancy controls at Starrett City can be viewed as "inclusionary"—for whites and, notably, for blacks who would otherwise not get to live in an integrated community...

...If blacks are ever to be truly integrated into society so that whites no longer need fear them, then their access to decent housing and jobs must be considered more important than integration— through discriminatory practices!—at any one site...

...In this sense, we are building racism into our community by administrative decree...

...it abandoned tenant screening as well, admitting large, single-parent welfare families without investigating their housing histories or ability to pay the rent...

...Morley challenges former NAACP attorney James Meyerson's contention that occupancy controls are "stigmatizing and exclusionary," designed to keep blacks out, while traditional affirmative action employs "inclusionary quotas," designed to bring in the previously excluded...

...The early, often "segregated" advances of other ethnic groups in neighborhoods they "took over" is ample testimony to that fact...

...But the cure is to control blacks...

...No whites living there would be asked to leave...

...Morley writes: The proof was right down the street in Linden Plaza, a middle-income project that opened in 1975...

...some of them would have insisted...

...THE SUCCESS OF SO MANY black working- and middleclass developments points up the critical issue that Starrett's defenders ignore: the unconscionable stigma involved and perpetuated in the exclusion of blacks...

...STARRETT CITY'S GLEAMING TOWERS and neatly landscaped grounds are home to a community of 15,000 with its own public school and shopping center...

...Certainly, no one argued that these two would bring deterioration with them, and therefore no stigma attached to their exclusion...

...they could not understand why, money and credentials in hand, they had been treated so shabbily in their search for a decent home...

...Did it mean that Yale admissions officers despised Jews...

...But Vanderveer tenants rallied, winning the right to screen new applicants, a policy that has had a marked effect in just a few years' time...

...The rage of anyone mugged once too often is unanswerable...

...Linden Plaza, in short, was engulfed by an impoverished black ghetto where unemployment is rampant and from which most of Linden Plaza's crime came...

...Tipping" is disruptive and painful, but its linkage to "inevitable" deterioration is illusive, and unacceptable as a premise for public policy...

...The same would be true, I suspect, for Starrett's whites (many of them Jews, ironically) under a color-blind admissions policy, using even the strictest of nonracial guidelines...

...One needn't revert to hoary defenses of "separate but equal" to argue that color-blind but cannily managed opportunity, "integrated" or not, is the only route to stability and decency, for blacks as well as for whites...

...Equal opportunity is a necessary, even if not sufficient, condition for the dissolution of white fears...

...Management neglect, in the form of inadequate security and demoralizingly slow repairs, was undoubtedly real, but one reason, in Linden Plaza's case, was a racist equation of "tipping" inside the project with crime coming largely from outside...

...These men's frustrations were real, precisely because they were acknowledged to be as well qualified as blacks admitted or hired preferentially instead of them...

...A WEEK AFTER MORLEY'S ARTICLE was published, black families on Starrett's waiting list jammed the federal courthouse in Brooklyn to learn how little the terms of the settlement offered them...

...Linden Plaza started out more than half black, well over the generally accepted 30 percent "tipping point...

...Ancient understandings would undoubtedly have ceased to govern the university's community life, and many of the old families would have sent their sons elsewhere rather than subject them to the code's dissolution, no matter how insipid or perverse a later generation might find it...

...That management commitment and tenant organization can be decisive is evident in the safety 18 and cleanliness of such middle- and working-class black communities as Harlem's Esplanade Gardens and River Bend, both built under subsidy programs similar to Starrett's...

...Starrett management's assumptions were clear, and Morley summarized them: 1 f the minority population . . . grew much larger than 30 percent, Starrett would almost certainly "tip"— 17 whites would begin to move out...

...Instead, the centerpiece of the solution hammered out last May in Federal District Court, which effectively preserves Starrett's race-based occupancy controls, is a political accommodation...

...The uniformity and sickening speed which characterized the tipping phenomena could not be solely explained by white racism...

...The causes are white anxieties, white attitudes...