Andrew DeFranza has seen it countless times: An affordable housing project proposed in a mostly white, well-off community goes before the zoning board or the planning commission. A vocal minority of homeowners, themselves mostly white and well off, show up to oppose it. The project is killed, shrunk or delayed by litigation for years.
“We hear a lot of, ‘I’m in support of affordable housing, just not here,’” says DeFranza, who’s the executive director of Harborlight Community Partners, a community development corporation in southern Essex County in Greater Boston.
He wasn’t surprised to hear the findings in “Racial Disparities in Housing Politics: Evidence from Administrative Data,” a new paper by Boston University researchers. As the Boston Globe reported last week, the study of public meetings in nearly 100 Greater Boston cities showed that white people accounted for 95 percent of participants. In the same area, white people make up 80 percent of the population. Using an analysis of last names and geographic data from public meetings, the researchers concluded that “whites overwhelmingly dominate zoning and planning board meetings.” (Details on how the BU researchers determined the race of participants are in the “Estimating Race” section of the paper.)
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BY JARED BREY | SEPTEMBER 6, 2018