Publish Inclusivity Ratings report ranking metropolitan areas based on metrics of inclusivity to address gaps in existing research, advance understanding of these issues, activate local leaders, and influence policy decisions.
The Inclusivity Institute was born out of a desire to grade metropolitan areas on different social, economic, and residential metrics of “Inclusivity”. The Inclusivity Rating is an ongoing project to do just this, ranking the public policies and lived realities of residents across 100 of America’s largest metropolitan areas.
Our Inclusivity Ratings Project seeks to provide new and actionable research across the following ten metrics:
- Exposure to poverty across federally assisted housing
- School segregation
- Tax treatment of affordable rental housing
- Mortgage lending disparities
- Mobility among tenants assisted by Housing Choice Vouchers
- The fair housing landscape
- Policing/criminal justice landscape
- Income policies to help low-income working families stabilize
- Zoning and land use policies
- Progress (or lack thereof) in desegregation
FIRST METRIC: EXPOSURE TO POVERTY ACROSS FEDERALLY ASSISTED HOUSING
SUMMARY:
In the first wave of publicly-assisted housing during the middle decades of the 20th century, much public housing was built in poor and minority communities, and was heavily and justly criticized for reinforcing patterns of racial and economic segregation. Since the 1970s, public- and assisted-housing efforts have often avowed an intention to break down these patterns and enable assisted tenants to live in more integrated, “higher opportunity” areas. In our first report, we develop a single, uniform measure that compares the degree to which tenants in the major assisted housing programs are exposed to poverty. We compute this measure for four major types of assisted housing: public housing, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (“LIHTC”) housing, and two Section 8 housing programs -- Housing Choice Vouchers (“HCVs”), and project-based rental assistance.
Our research found that while tenants in these programs do, on average, live in significantly poorer-than-average neighborhoods as anticipated, there is enormous variation across metro areas and programs. In short, even within the same federal program, metro areas diverge tremendously in the degree to which their assisted tenants avoid heavy concentrations of poverty. This finding therefore implies that state, county, and city policies play a large role in determining where assisted housing is located and where vouchers are used. Accordingly, they should be held accountable for playing that role constructively.
SECOND METRIC: SCHOOL SEGREGATION
SUMMARY:
Nearly fifty million children attend elementary and secondary schools in the United States. In our society, quality public education is the crucial mechanism for building pathways to opportunity. In our economy, education is the great engine for developing human capital and thus a key ingredient for economic growth. And in our polity, education is the key to creating an informed citizenry committed to sustaining democracy. All three goals are undercut to the extent that schools vary dramatically in their conditions and quality.
Since the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, where segregation by legal decree – the de jure segregation that Brown struck down. But the task of achieving de facto integration, has proven more difficult and elusive than perhaps any of the justices who produced Brown foresaw. Many aspects of school segregation are the subject of intense debate.
In our research, we rely on the systematic data collected by the Department of Education to develop objective measures of school segregation and school funding that can be compared across metropolitan areas. We have not conducted case studies into special desegregation programs undertaken by individual school districts, though we hope to do so in future versions. Nonetheless, we think our limited analysis helpfully clarifies a lot about the nature and extent of school segregation, how it differs across metropolitan areas, and how it has evolved.
SAMPLE OF FINDINGS:
A critical early finding of our research confirms that housing and school segregation are closely intertwined; at the metro level, the correlation of Black-white dissimilarity in the housing market has a .88 correlation with Black-white dissimilarity for 5th graders. Additionally, we found that ten of the largest MSAs generally fare poorly – with the exception of Seattle. This is first and foremost because very large MSAs tend to have more severe housing segregation; segregation is particularly high and severe in the big metro areas of the Northeast and Midwest.
