Obama administration to unveil major new rules targeting segregation across U.S.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/08/obama-administration-to-unveil-major-new-rules-targeting-segregation-across-u-s/

The centerpiece of the new rule is a vast trove of geographic data covering every community in the country — its racial makeup, its poverty rate, its concentration of housing vouchers and public housing, as well as the quality of its schools and its public transit. Nearly all of this data, already gathered by the government, comes from publicly available sources like the Census. But HUD hopes the database will enable communities to more clearly track where poverty and segregation overlap, where housing voucher recipients live relative to good schools, which neighborhoods contain no affordable housing at all.

The premise of the rule is that all of this mapped data will make hidden barriers visible — and that once communities see them, they will be much harder to ignore.

The administration’s announcement comes less than two weeks after the Supreme Court reaffirmed the power of the Fair Housing Act to ban housing policies that harm minorities. After a years-long delay, it is also arriving during a rare civil-rights moment, as the nation returns to familiar questions from the 1960s about the underlying causes of racial unrest in American cities.

“There is no question in my mind that part of the issue with Baltimore or Ferguson is about the relationship between the community and the police, but it’s much deeper than that,” Castro says. “It’s also fundamentally about people having opportunity in their lives. And where you live, in many ways, dictates the level of opportunity that you have.”