The St. Louis region has a modest housing desegregation program, but politicians and area residents need to offer their support for the program to make a meaningful impact on our region. The Mobility Connection program operates between the city and the county housing authorities to assist families with Housing Choice Vouchers (Section 8) find housing in High Opportunity Areas. In St. Louis, 95 percent of families with vouchers are black, and the majority of High Opportunity Areas (with low-poverty and little subsidized housing) are predominately White.
Mobility Connection began as a pilot program in response to the social problems highlighted by the Ferguson Commission report. At Mobility Connection, we help families with vouchers find housing in low-poverty, low-crime neighborhoods that would be out of reach without a subsidy from the federal government. Families lucky enough to receive a voucher take it to the private rental market. If the family can find a willing landlord, the federal government pays a portion of the family’s rent.
Unfortunately, many families with vouchers both in the St. Louis region and nationwide end up living in the poorest and most segregated neighborhoods because so few property owners in safer, more prosperous neighborhoods accept vouchers, and because of the limited supply of moderately priced rental housing.
Federal tax dollars could offer a chance out of poverty for the 13,000 families with housing vouchers in St. Louis city and county; instead we subsidize poor families to live in poor areas. A recent study showed that when low-income children move to low-poverty neighborhoods at a young age, they make higher incomes as adults and are more likely to attend college. Adults do better, too: they are less likely to become obese or diabetic and to experience depression. However, getting these families with housing vouchers into High Opportunity Areas is an uphill battle.
In a little over a year, Mobility Connection has helped nearly 30 families move to High Opportunity Areas, but in order to bring this program to scale, the region needs a larger supply of affordable housing and many more property owners willing to accept vouchers as a form of payment. Even with steady jobs, crime-free records and good credit scores, many of our families are denied even the opportunity to apply for affordable housing in St. Louis’s near suburbs – with good schools and affordable rent – because so many property owners refuse to accept vouchers.
In many of our neighborhoods and cities, it is both legal and common practice for property owners to discriminate against voucher holders. I commonly find “No Section 8” in the description section for available units across the region. Some cities and states have created laws to make this practice illegal.
A “Source of Income” Law would make it illegal to deny an applicant’s application due to their source of income. St. Louis city passed a Source of Income Law in 2015, but zero municipalities in St. Louis County have such a law. If municipalities like Brentwood, Chesterfield, Maryland Heights, Olivette, St. Louis County, or Webster Groves, each of which have an ample supply of affordable rental housing, were to enact Source of Income laws, more families could take full advantage of their housing vouchers. The housing voucher would not just provide the much-needed support to afford housing costs – it would be used as a tool for upward mobility and desegregation.
Of course, only some areas in the St. Louis region even have affordable rental housing, or multi-family housing for that matter. Ladue zoning ordinances prohibit the development of any type of multi-family housing, and the property lot sizes beg for developers to build extravagant single-family homes that only the wealthiest among us can afford. Whether or not these policy choices were deliberately created to segregate our region, the fact is that they have and will continue to do so.
The difference is that now, a new report developed by the For Sake of All and six area partners chronicles how housing policy contributes to the racial divide in the St. Louis region. Policy makers and residents cannot feign ignorance of the role we have played in creating segregated communities. It is up to the region’s leadership to decide if they have the political will to counter the social engineering of the past and to move forward to create more equitable and open communities for the future.
Do St. Louis leaders want to offer more families of color the opportunity to raise their children in the region’s most thriving communities? Only time will tell.
Jane E. Oliphant is the lead housing counselor for Ascend STL, Inc. and operates the Mobility Connection Program.
This is the fifth in a series of commentaries devoted to the new report Segregation in St. Louis: Dismantling the Divide (forthesakeofall.org/segregationinstlouis).
