An Individual Preference Approach to Suburban Racial Desegregation
![handle is hein.journals/frdurb27 and id is 547 raw text is: AN INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE
APPROACH TO SUBURBAN
RACIAL DESEGREGATION
Paul Boudreaux*
vTRODUCTION
Thirty years after the enactment of the Fair Housing Act of 1968
(the FHA),' racial segregation in housing persists throughout
America's metropolitan areas.2 Despite the hope that outlawing
housing discrimination would result in desegregation, African
Americans3 in metropolitan areas continue to live in neighbor-
hoods that are composed predominantly of members of their own
race.4 In particular, the replication of this segregation in the sub-
urbs, to which African Americans are moving in large numbers,
seems to contradict the assumptions of 1968, at which time it was
argued that blacks were trapped in central city ghettos due to dis-
* Attorney, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C. J.D., University of
Virginia; LL.M., Georgetown University. The author would like to thank Professor
Sheryll Cashin of Georgetown for her comments on an earlier draft of this essay. The
opinions expressed in this essay are the author's alone and not of the Department of
Justice.
1. 42 U.S.C. §§ 3601-3631 (1994).
2. See DOUGLAS A. MASSEY & NANCY A. DENTON, AMERICAN APARTHEID 67-
74 (1993).
3. The FHA prohibits housing discrimination on account of any racial factor. See
42 U.S.C. §§ 3604-3605 (1994). Most commentary on racial integration focuses on
African Americans and whites in large part because of the small numbers of other
racial groups in the United States as recently as 1968. Since then, a surge in immigra-
tion has increased tremendously the numbers of Hispanics, Asians, and members of
other racial groups. See WORLD ALMANAC 379 (1997) (observing that the Hispanic
population was up to 9.0% in 1990 from 6.4% in 1980 and the Asian population was
up to 2.9% from 1.5%). For the sake of simplicity, this paper will concentrate on the
concept of a two-race metropolitan area. Some of what this essay proposes can apply
to other racial minorities, but it has been asserted that no other racial group has ex-
perienced the same level of segregation as have African Americans. See MASSEY &
DENTON, supra note 2, at 77. Finally, as a matter of style, this paper employs the term
African American, which appears to have superseded the term black in most
academic writing as of 1998. Exceptions include some references to census data that
uses the term black.
4. See MASSEY & DENTON, supra note 2, at 221-23 (comparing Census data from
1980 and 1990 and concluding that segregation [especially in the north] remains high
and virtually constant).
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An Individual Preference Approach to Suburban Racial Desegregation
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