Still more on the Westchester County Settlement

[This is an LTE from one of the attorneys in the Westchester County housing discrimination case settlement]

The Court Is Right About Westchester County Housing

Your description of the landmark settlement that emerged from the Anti-Discrimination Center's lawsuit against Westchester County as "the government deciding where it wants people to live" ("Color-Coding the Suburbs," Review & Outlook, Aug. 15) bears no relation to the actual terms of the agreement nor to the history of residential racial segregation in Westchester County.

Westchester is deeply, deeply residentially segregated. A dozen of its municipalities have African-American populations of less than 1%. Nine more municipalities have African-American populations of less than 2%. The principal indices of segregation show, remarkably, that Westchester was more segregated in 2000 than it was in 1950.

One should not be fooled into thinking that it is only poorer African-Americans who are living separately from whites. The most widely used measure of segregation has demonstrated that African-American households earning more than $150,000 per year are more segregated from whites than are African-American households earning less than $50,000 per year.

Recipients of federal community development funds have long been required to identify and act to overcome barriers to fair housing choice. Indeed, recipients can only receive grant funds if they represent that they have done so. From 2000 to 2006, Westchester received more than $50 million by making such representations. Earlier this year, a federal judge granted the Anti-Discrimination Center's motion for partial summary judgment, finding as a matter of law that Westchester had "utterly failed" to meet its affirmatively-furthering-fair-housing obligations, and finding as well that every one of Westchester's representations that it had done so was "false or fraudulent."

The only "social engineering" involved in the case was the evidence of Westchester County having perpetuated segregation by not using its authority to overcome artificial barriers to affordable housing development in its whitest municipalities while at the same time channeling such development into areas of concentrated African-American population.

The settlement is designed to overcome the rigid exclusionary zoning that has prevented both for-profit and not-for-profit developers from constructing the type of context-sensitive affordable housing in Westchester towns and villages that they have built elsewhere in the country. By creating these opportunities in communities where they have been absent, and by making it clear for the first time that people of all races and backgrounds are welcome throughout the county, the settlement both creates real consumer choice and, 41 years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, takes an important step toward ending the legacy of "two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal."

Craig Gurian, Executive Director
Anti-Discrimination Center
New York