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When developers planned to build 60 subsidized apartments in an affluent corner of Florence, SC, the County Council Chairman got excited. Affordable housing “will meet a great need,” he wrote, and its proximity to services and jobs is consistent with county planning goals. He promised to give a small grant.
Then the neighbors came to know. Lawyers, officials and civic leaders gathered at the Florence Country Club, half a mile from the proposed development, and vowed to block it. Nine days later, the plan was dealt a fatal blow when the council, in a three-minute and 14-second meeting, began repurposing the site under the leadership of the chairman who had praised it.
The council’s sudden reversal is the subject of a fair housing suit — most of the potential tenants were black in a neighborhood of mostly white residents — and a study of the forces that keep low-income families away from opportunity-rich neighborhoods.
In many if not most affluent communities, existing land-use regulations may prohibit low-income housing, with rules often working so quietly that they hide how outright exclusion is a product of design. But a quirk in the Florence County zoning code allowing subsidized apartments brought public opposition.
“What’s unusual here is that we see an exercise of political power that is typically invisible,” said Jessica Traunstein, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University who studies housing regulation. “This makes the opposition to affordable housing more visible than it often is.”
The lack of affordable housing is wreaking havoc on families of modest means across the country. Nearly two-thirds of low-income renters – a record share – face a “severe cost burden,” meaning they spend more than half of their income on rent and utilities. The federal government considers shelter affordable if it consumes 30 percent or less of income.
At the same time, growing evidence has highlighted the harms that growing up in deprived places causes to children. As gateways to schools, safety, and connections, neighborhoods go a long way in determining who gets on. A pioneering study found that by moving to a better neighborhood, the average lifetime earnings of children from low-income families increased by nearly $200,000.
Speaking before the County Council, opponents said the Florence project would increase traffic and flooding threats to the troubled area. Critics said building apartments near one of the city’s busiest intersections would force more drivers to pass through the streets where their children play, and paving six acres of wooded space would worsen runoff.
No one mentioned the caste or class of the potential tenants.
“It’s a great time for us to move this nice project to a better location,” neighborhood resident Gene Leatherman told the council. “We are not opposed to development – we are opposed to the location of this development.”
Like many opponents of the project, Ms. Leatherman has a history of civic engagement, including work raising money for public schools, whose students largely come from low-income and minority backgrounds.
“This is not about race,” he said in an interview, referring to opposition to the project. “If it was a $500,000 luxury apartment I wouldn’t care. If you put 60 of them, I will be opposed.”
A separate conversation involving other opponents of the project surfaced on Facebook, where one warned that subsidized housing serves “sorry lazy people” and another wrote that “the only thing that protects us from high crime is There is distance.” Low-income housing is “bullshit,” a third person wrote.
The proposed apartments, known as Jessamine, received financing from the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, the federal government’s largest affordable housing program. It spends about $13 billion a year to give developers tax credits, which they typically sell to banks or other corporations to fund construction in exchange for keeping rents low.
Unlike public housing or Section 8, the program is not for the poorest tenants. The developers of Jessamine call it workforce housing for people like nursing assistants or security guards. But some poor families rent tax-credit apartments with vouchers or other assistance. In South Carolina, the median annual income of tax-credit tenants is about $17,000.
In a statewide competition for credit, Jessamine won points for location – its census tract had the county’s best score on the Index of Opportunity – and political support. Shawn Brashear, the county planning director, praised its “ideal location”, and Council President Willard Dority Jr. pledged up to $10,000 for a fire hydrant.
Most of the neighborhood, called Country Club, was zoned for single-family housing. But Jessamine was in a non-zoned “doughnut hole” — county property surrounded by city land — in which apartments were allowed.
When neighbors saw workers preparing the site, concern spread. Frank J. “I was getting calls every day,” Brand II, who was the district’s councilman at the time, said in a statement. “Nobody called me saying they were happy.”
Some residents approached developers to buy them. Hostile articles appeared in a political blog. Hours before critics were to meet at the country club to plan their protest, Mr. Dorietti rescinded his endorsement.
Nine days later, in a meeting lasting less than four minutes, the council voted 8-0 to halt construction in the Donut Holes and reconsider their zoning. More meetings were required to finalize the postponement, but the outcome was clear.
Jessamine’s opponents included the former mayor of Florence, Joe W. Pierce Jr. included; a lawyer from one of the city’s most prominent families, Walker H. Wilcox; and Ms. Leatherman, whose late husband, Hugh K. Leatherman, a state senator for 40 years, was often described as the most powerful man in South Carolina.
Another critic, C. Pierce Campbell, runs Turner Padgett, one of the state’s largest law firms; His house is a few yards away from the proposed site. He told the council that heavy traffic had caused cars to overturn in his yard and that a proposed drainage pond next to the road could make such accidents fatal.
“It’s the most dangerous thing I’ve ever heard of,” he said.
Unlike out-of-town developers, “I live there,” he said, and “it matters to me personally.”
While influential critics spoke out forcefully, few people outside the neighborhood knew the proposal existed, and no potential tenants addressed the council. “I suspect they knew,” said the Rev. Calvin Robinson Jr., pastor of Trinity Baptist Church, a predominantly Black congregation. “I didn’t know about it.”
Drew Schaumber, one of the developers, wrote to council members saying they should be “ashamed” of ignoring the needs of tenants. “You represent all Florence citizens, not just those who live in the 29501 zip code,” he wrote.
The outlines of the dispute will sound familiar to students of fair housing. In one of the first cases under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, a federal court found that Lackawanna, NY had illegally rezoned a white neighborhood to block subsidized housing. While officials said they acted to protect strained sewers, the court saw “disgusting discrimination” and warned, “This pattern is out of date.”
In 1983, a federal court found that Greenville County, SC, had broken the law by rezoning a site planned for subsidized housing. She ruled that the neighborhood’s opposition was “motivated by racial concerns – not by objections to overcrowding or waste disposal capacity.”
Georgetown County, S.C., is being sued for rejecting a tax-credit project opposed by residents of a golf-course community 1.6 miles away. While the project received unanimous support from the Planning Commission, critics online warned that it would serve “lazy welfare lives” and create a “breeding ground for crime”. As in Florence, most of the tenants would have been black, and most of the critics were white.
Opposition to affordable housing is also common in left-leaning communities, most recently in Milton, Mass., and the Chevy Chase section of Washington, D.C. Fears about property values, crime, and schools often provoke debate.
“A lot has changed in American life over the past 50 years, but hostility toward affordable housing remains surprisingly durable,” said Justin Still, a professor of urban planning and law at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is an expert witness. . Jessamine Developers.
Since the passage of the Fair Housing Act, Mr. Still said, residential segregation by race has declined modestly, and economic segregation has increased as affluent people are increasingly living in wealthier neighborhoods.
To win the Florence lawsuit, the developers do not need to show that the officers had discriminatory purposes—only that their actions had a racially disparate impact (without serving a legitimate goal that could not be accomplished by less discriminatory means. could go).
Analyzing other Florence tax-credit housing, Mr. Steele estimated that 78 percent of Jessamine’s tenants would have been black in a neighborhood that is at least 80 percent white. Its abolition therefore “perpetuated residential segregation,” he wrote.
Council members said they had long intended to re-examine zoning in the county’s so-called donut hole and did not exclude Jessamine.
Many economists argue that exclusionary zoning increases rents by limiting housing supply. Growing evidence shows that it also hinders mobility by keeping low-income children from places where they can thrive.
Opportunity Insights, a research project based at Harvard, collected more than 20 million de-identified tax records to track neighborhood effects on people born in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It found that by moving from a below-average to an above-average neighborhood in terms of opportunity, low-income children increased their average lifetime earnings by $198,000.
“Where you grow up matters a lot for shaping your life outcomes,” said project founder Nathaniel Hendren, now an economist at MIT.
Mr. Schaumber, the developer, has built four tax-credit buildings in Florence without resistance, but they were all in low-income neighborhoods. Quindolyn Bynes, 40, lives in a place called Belmont, which is cozy and clean, but on a commercial street, separated from a car repair shop by a fence with razor wire.
Ms. Bynes has done clerical work for school systems in the area for 15 years and earns about $38,000. But she has never been able to afford market-rate housing, which would consume about 45 percent of her income.
She said she and her daughters love their three-bedroom apartment, where 5-year-old Kaylee sleeps with a unicorn bedspread and 12-year-old Kaylin displays certificates from the honor roll. ($765 monthly rent is about 60 percent of the market rate.) But Ms. Bynes said affordable housing “shouldn’t just be in poor parts of the city.”
Opportunity Insights’ data sets the stakes. It shows that by moving from Ms. Binns’ census tract to the neighborhood of the Country Club, a low-income child will grow up to earn an extra $12,000 a year on average. That’s a gain of about 50 percent, which Mr. Hendren called “extremely rare” in social policy.
Ms. Bynes lived in a separate tax-credit building for a time, until threats from a violent boyfriend forced her to move. He described Jessamine’s location as ideal for raising children and suggested a reason beyond traffic for the neighborhood’s opposition.
“We,” she said. “I feel like they don’t want African Americans there.”
In statements, council members, who did not respond to interview requests, reiterated their warnings about traffic and flooding. Mr. Brand, who lost his next election to represent the Country Club neighborhood, partly blamed the Jessamine controversy and said he wished he had taken action sooner to scale back or stop the project.
Mr Dorati said he withdrew his support out of respect for Mr Brand’s opposition and the voters he represents.
“The consensus of the Florence County Council,” he said, “is you don’t mess with another person’s district.”