Local fair-housing advocates are battling the Westchester county government (an affluent New York suburb) for what they say are discriminatory housing practices. Daniel Denvir has a great piece over at Salon which describes the county’s efforts to confine affordable housing to a few, out-of-the-way, quadrants. Here’s a portion:

Westchester, like many other counties, receives millions of dollars in federal funds that require recipients to support fair housing. ADC (Anti-Discrimination Center) sued Westchester under the False Claims Act, legislation typically used to sue for things like Medicare fraud, asserting that the county had misrepresented its performance on fair housing…

Gurian and other civil rights activists are looking to the Obama administration for help — but so far they aren’t getting any. Even though it was the federal government (through the Department of Housing and Urban Development) that Westchester allegedly defrauded, the Justice Department is joining the county in opposing ADC’s motions.

The federal government has always been reluctant to enforce integrated housing, and it refused to intervene in the ADC case until February 2009, when U.S. District Judge Denise Cote found that the “county’s certifications were false claims” and that it had “utterly failed to comply with the regulatory requirement.”

- Daniel Denvir (Segregation in the land of Limousine Liberalism)

As anyone who is the least bit acquainted with census data knows, America remains a deeply segregated nation. Included below is a map of the most recent census data of the area in question.

To put housing segregation in broader context, consider Wacquant’s argument that the hyperghetto is produced not only as a side effect of deindustrialization but intentionally as a weapon of stigmatization.

The transformed class structure of the hyperghetto is a direct product of its evolving position in the transformed urban political economy of the past three decades. From the Great Migration of the interwar years to the 1960s, the ghetto served a positive economic function as reservoir of cheap and pliable labor for the city’s factories. By the 1970s, the engine of the metropolitan economy had passed from manufacturing to business- and knowledge-based services and to factories relocated in suburbs and exurbs, in anti-union states in the South, and in foreign countries.

Between 1954 and 1982, the number of manufacturing establishments in Chicago plunged from 10,288 to 5,203, while the number of production workers sank from nearly half a million to 172,000. The demand for black labor plummeted accordingly, rocking the entire black class structure (in 1945, half of all employed African Americans in Chicago were blue-collar wage earners). As Jeremy Rifkin points out, just as mechanization had enabled Southern agriculture to dispense with black labor a generation earlier, “automation and suburban relocation created a crisis of tragic dimension for unskilled black workers” in the North, as “for the first time in American history, the African American was no longer needed in the economic system” of the metropolis. The effects of technological upgrading and postindustrialization were intensified by sustained residential segregation, the breakdown of public schools, and the renewal of working-class immigration from Latin America and Asia—all of which helped consign the vast majority of uneducated blacks to economic redundancy. Instead of providing a reservoir of cheap labor, the hyperghetto now stores a surplus population devoid of market utility, in which respect it also increasingly resembles the prison system.

- Loic Wacquant (Deadly Symbiosis)